Mumbler

melancholy - the state of not being sure if you’re sad

why is the sound of my neighbor’s music coming in through my opened window superior to the sound of similar music from my own player?

the only trick i’ve found is to zoom out as little as possible. to concentrate on the deliciousness of lamp light flirting with the colors in the room bold enough to declare themselves while the others stand back, little laughs behind fingers. to revel in the tiny spot on the face of your friend as his cheek pulls his lip tight to itself in a moment of unguarded intimacy. etc. don’t leave the room, not for a second, because you know you’ll never come back. certainly not the same and certainly not able to enjoy intimations of love through paying attention. okay so maybe you can leave for a second, but only if leaving helps you see everything better and with even deeper love. like, oh yes I am a child of God. that’s helpful. but anything else, and the day’s doomed. 

You know after it rains down here when the light turns eerie yellow like a picture from the seventies and wet dirt gets smeared on your legs above your socks, and you feel like the earth is catching its breath? So it was like that, and I was sitting on a bench in the playground, feeling the water I couldn’t brush off seeping into my shorts and underwear. We’d just had this conversation that we called a conversation but it was really Tom and me telling the kids to just please stop being so damn mean. And well, I started thinking about people I know and used to know and can’t know anymore and about them as kids. And this one person in particular because there was that day that his mom and I sat on her new couch for hours while she showed me these pictures of him growing up. And I was just thinking, what if someone was mean to him? Well of course they were, but like, what if people were mean to him in all these small ugly ways all the time until he was old enough to figure out the rules about how to be mean back enough that people cut it out a bit. But it stayed with him forever in ways he didn’t know and I didn’t know because we don’t remember this happening. That’s what I’ve watched this summer. Kids learning to defend themselves by making the other ones feel worse or more humiliated. Just because they’re hurting, and we tend to hurt when we’re hurting. Read last night about how we should never confuse our essential nature for bad though it can look that way if you observe children, like I’m describing. Our essential nature is just so fucking soft and tender, that’s all. And that sounds pretty true to me. And I don’t know if it was the weather I was telling you about, but I just sat there in my slowly soaking shorts and cried under my big dark sunglasses and sun hat the kids are always pulling off and thrusting on their giggly heads. I love them with this huge part of me, and I just want them to feel that and maybe be a little kinder because of it. The whole thing was embarrassing from a few points of view, but from my own, it felt okay. 

“Buddha falling flat on her face; buddha feeling on top of the world; buddha longing for yesterday.”

Pema