bricolage project day 8 [“waking-life”]

This Waking Life

I went biking around Greenlake with my daughter this afternoon so I decided to make my bricolage there with whatever I found.  The graffiti was already on the table and I love it.  Love the color and the form.  My rule was that everything had to come from the ground.  You will see that the date is made up from the objects in the piece.  I loved doing this.  It took a long time to get it just right and I found it very meditative.  As we biked home at twilight after biking for about ten miles, I felt so renewed.

Today’s word(s) “waking-life”, comes from Michael Meade‘s book Fate and Destiny: The Two Agreements of the Soul.  This book is so good.  So devourable.  If you’ve never seen Meade speak or been to one of his workshops, I highly recommend it.  You will come away altered.  I count him as one of my most beloved and revered teachers.  Today’s quote comes from the book I mentioned:

When we ignore the limits of fate and the hints of destiny we tighten the unconscious web of our lives.  Eventually, we make our lives fixed, settled, and intractable.  Thus, we seal our own fate and ignore our hidden destinies…Shifting fate and finding the destiny within is part of the art of truly living and of living truly.

I heard it’s National Poetry Day today so I’ll share one of my very favorite poems:

I Ask for Silence, Pablo Neruda (trans. Alastair Reid)

Now they can leave me in peace.
Now they grow used to my absence.

I am going to close my eyes.

I want only five things,
five chosen roots.

One is an endless love.

Two is to see the autumn.
I cannot exist without leaves
flying and falling to the earth.

The third is the solemn winter,
the rain I loved, the caress
of fire in the rough cold.

Fourth, the summer,
plump as a watermelon.

And fifthly, your eyes,
Matilde, my dear love,
I won’t sleep without your eyes,
I won’t exist without your gaze,
I adjust the spring
for you to follow me with your eyes.

That, friends, is all I want.
Next to nothing, close to everything.

Now they can go if they wish.

I have lived so much that some day
they will have to forget me forcibly,
rubbing me off the blackboard.
My heart was inexhaustible.

But because I ask for silence,
don’t think I’m going to die.
The opposite is true;
it happens I am going to live.

To be, and to go on being.

I will not be, however, if inside me,
the crop does not keep sprouting,
the shoots first, breaking through the earth
to reach the light;
but the mothering earth is dark,
and, deep inside me, I am dark.
I am a well in the water of which
the night leaves behind stars
and goes on alone across fields.

It’s a question of having lived so much
that I want to live a bit more.

I never felt my voice so clear,
never have been so rich in kisses.

Now, as always, it is early.
The light is a swarm of bees.

Let me alone with the day.
I ask leave to be born.