vječnaja pamjat
this is dedicated to Dosta C. who left our world today. Memory eternal
one thing i am doing lately is trying to locate myself more securely in time — by this i don’t mean the seconds or hours or even named days or months, but in the shifting of light as it moves from dawn to dusk and back again, in the drift of seasons and the changes they draw forth from everything around me, and in me as well. i do this largely through walking which i try to do daily through my neighbourhood, seeing as i go, trying to really see the changes that happen so minutely that when unseen, can seem to happen all at once. sometimes i listen to music while i walk; lately it has been sufjan stevens singing will anybody ever love me? which i have wondered sometimes with despair, and lately with more curiosity. sometimes it is with no aural accompaniment other than that of the neighbourhood sounds — the wind rustling the seed pods of the flowers that are going over, the birdsong, the traffic that always seems distant but always present.
today when i was walking i thought a lot about grief: how it is less an event than a way of being in the world, a way of seeing in the world, a way of knowing the world and being known by it. i don’t think i made any clear decision but rather came to it slowly through walking, and thinking, and through silences — that is, to allow grief to make a home in my heart and become a part of it, to stop seeing it as something external to fight or prevail against, or to pass through on my way to somewhere else. in this way it makes me think of how i experience time, and how i want to experience time, and how i am coming to experience time. if i am not mindful of it time becomes a loaf of sliced bread, one piece allocated to each moment in increments of seconds or hours or days to be consumed and forgotten. i want to experience time like water, like as when i am in the living water of a lake, immersed in it, it is whole and undivided, and always in flux even where it moves gently. how i am coming to experience to time is in the way i imagine the other living things experience the lake: that there is no division between their own bodies and the medium in which they move, together they constitute lake and are indivisible, integrated, and in mutual communion. in this way, as i am in time, i am in my grief and it is in me, and it cannot be any other now.
and yet, there is so much more than this, i see that now, even (especially) as when it is painful and i feel it keenly.