"Deep Thoughts": August 2009 Archives

What is it about the end of summer that just fills me with longing? I feel the same way about Sunday nights, which makes a tail-of-summer Sunday night a double whammy.

It was a slightly odd weekend. Not bad, but full of unacted-upon impulses and chance meetings. It left me feeling a little gnawing emptiness, like hunger - nothing to get excited about, but discomfiting.

I wonder, sometimes, whether the end of life will feel like that - like a meal that wasn't quite right. One enjoyed the things one ate, but there was surely something missing - a magical lemon sorbet that never appeared.

I had a friend whose mother died very young, and I remember her talking about the tragedy of it, not just of her dying, but of all the things left unfinished in that early departure. Of her never having been sufficiently loved.

That's a fear that drives a lot of us, I think. That we won't find the "loves of our lives" before we die, and then, it is supposed, our years here will have been in vain. I am not sure I believe it's got that kind of importance.

Oh, it's not that I don't believe in the existence of love; I've experienced it several times, in several different ways, each of them interesting and imperfect and not destined to last.

I guess that's okay.

You can say this is terrible, cynical, depressing, or whathaveyou, but I don't necessarily think it's all that important to be in love in a way that lasts forever and takes you through to the edge of the grave.

I think love in the wider sense teaches us things and helps our lives feel substantial and worthy. But romantic love? I dunno. There are so many different kinds, after all.

There is the kind that seems to grow right out of one's body, as if it were a tree with roots in our groin. There is the kind that suggests an electrical spark jumping the gap between two minds, so that you needn't always voice the thought to have it heard. There is the kind that makes one aware of the texture of one's heart, as a soft, yielding, springy presence in one's chest. Like those very expensive mattresses that take on an imprint of the flesh pressing into them and retain it for a time.

They're all compelling. But as the center of one's life? One's whole purpose for being here? I don't buy it.

My own purpose(s) for being here (and I begin to think they are plural) are shifting, shadowy. They change and mutate and morph. They are magical creatures whom I never quite catch. I find that it's best not to look for them directly, and best not to chase. I can sense their presence, and I can make them welcome in my home, and that's about all. Like all wild creatures, they're to be respected, not tamed.

A woman I'd just met started to tell me my fortune the other day, or rather, to describe my inclinations.

Indulgent, she said. Check.

Dreamy. Oh yes.

She was a striking woman. Long dark hair, some kind of Middle Eastern heritage, but she was from Sweden.

I was drinking wine, which I seldom do anymore (and for which I paid dearly the following day). We were sitting on large cushions on the floor at a party.

It was a strange party.

All the women there were exquisitely beautiful. There were only four men, and two of them were a couple. Around them flitted tall, long-legged international supermodels.

Okay, they weren't actual supermodels; they just looked that way. They were restaurateurs, writers, photojournalists. My friends are very interesting, and often quite decorative (or decorated), but they don't look like this crowd.

I teased the host about having a hobby of collecting beautiful people, and he gallantly gestured to me, as if to say, yes darling, that's why you're here. It took two tries before I realized what he meant.

Over the weekend I bartered my playmate into sitting for me and the Nikon, but it took some doing. He dislikes having his picture taken. I often think taking photos requires the same skills as taming wild animals. You have to distract the subject with something - a little soothing conversation, a little soft noise, so they're looking elsewhere, so they forget you're there with a big black lens.

The photos came out beautiful, even for me. I sent him some, and he wouldn't even look.

Sometimes it takes someone else to show us to ourselves.

I think we all have an image of ourselves, or maybe several of them, and having to see the external face and body captured on film or video is unsettling.

It makes us realize that our self-image is of the internal us. And that while we may occasionally meet others who can recognize our Selves shining out of our eyes, or being transmitted in the way we move, laugh, or dance, that's not what is visible most of the time to most of the people we come into contact with.

That's disturbing, and so we hide from it.

I liked that woman at the party. She wasn't the person with whom I had the easiest, most smoothly moving conversation, but she was my favorite of the people I met that night. It was something about her eyes, and her warm energy.

And I'll tell you this - I have fallen in love at first sight a few times. In each case, it wasn't romantic love. It was just - I met a person and instantly felt who they were, could see it radiating toward me.

Sometimes I wonder whether people get that from me, too.