We ran away this weekend. Fast, hard and with the inevitable collisions. Against red rock and grey stones and the light, fresh green of new leaves, we walked the river, picked our way through boulders and logs, and lava shaped round and soft by a river ages old.
We talked. We fought. We made love and held hands. We were intimate — away from the deep pulls, the running pressure of our turbulent lives — sane and real.
I am always surprised that passion and intimacy are so linked though perhaps I shouldn’t be. Still, when I think of it, I imagine intimacy as a kind of quiet, a stillness in time. The latin root of passion is: suffering. The roots of intimacy are: put or pressed into (with a sense, from a slightly different root, of inmost).
Suffering, pressed into, inmost. Suffering the beauty of color. Suffering the weight of love. Pressed into a place, a time, a history, the inmost, tenderest parts. The smallness of us. The hugeness of us. The rolling, sliding, rushing, calm, mysteriousness of it all. And is there a point?
This was what we pondered in the abstract and in the deeply personal. We wrestled philosophically and emotionally with all the tools at our disposal until finally we were so spent there was nothing left to do but play cards, drink wine and smile at each other.
I have spent most of the last 30 years trying to find a point. The art has been about going far enough in to find something that somehow makes sense, resolves the questions, formulates a philosphy that answers not only why, but how to live. And the funny thing is, right now, I’m pondering the point of that.
Its so easy to get trapped by a doctrine, stuck in a belief, encapusalted in conviction. Now, I am finding that the convictions and beliefs, the constructs of safety and order I have created are only boats, frail ones at that, down a wild river. They are the leaf, the twig, and the plastic bottle floating with the current until the inevitable log dam or waterfall catches them, crushes them, or rips them apart.
It seems that inevitably, I find myself either stuck or in the water. Do I try to catch another leaf, another twig? Or, in this moment, wet and shivering and gasping for air, am I a part of the mystery and force of this river. Am I then, outside the constructs of safety and order, simply finding a way to be.
