True Love & Nostalgia, & Deepest Beliefs
Love & seduction are an interwoven pair. Beautiful, but edged with potential tragedy.
Much of that tragedy comes from the modern world being designed to be incredibly seductive. I blush to say it, but my frist & deepest love was reading. I blush, because it's a little odd to take this idea as deep as it goes. I loved to read stories, I would curl up & fantasize worlds as I read them for days on end. I think I loved reading deeper than I've loved any other thing or person in my life. Therefore, a tickle of awkwardness talking about this.
I would say I loved reading deeper than I've loved any woman. That's hard to say as a very adult man. But upon reflection I do consider it true. True Love is a reserved term, & of too great an import to waste, but if it is possible to say this straight faced, I had a true love for reading as a child. But that love died, & my heart is scarred, covered in the scars of nostalgia.
I think this is a more common feeling than we admit, as adults, just how deep our love grows for that which forms us as children. In particular I remember this one series of books, which I gaze upon up on my shelf as I write this. Arthur Randsome's Swallows & Amazons classics from the 1930s.
I remember curling up on the couch wrapped in blankets with my mother & sister, as she read it to us, so young I remember her explaining words we'd never heard nearly every page. Crackling fire, howling wind & the darkness of a winter evening outside the 4 walls surrounding us. As romantic a memory as you wish to ever imagine. This was my formative experience with reading.
I went from learning reader books directly into the Hobbit by Tolkien. My father was reading it too us, but going far too slow for me, I took matters into my own hands. I had to guess the meaning of a lot of words, but by the end I was reading silently. Hopefully this sets the stage, unveiling what sort of child I was & what relationship I had to reading. I was deeply immursed from the beginning.
I remember vividly the day my love of reading died. I believe I was reading the last chapters of The Last Battle, by C. S. Lewis. I sensed a battle within myself & so perhaps within the author, but I was not quite cued into the idea of considering the author a separate mind to his work at the time. That battle was of how to bring the deeply wrot threads of emotional connection into completion within the story. If you know the story, know this, I found myself broken over the idea of destruction of all that I'd known being the gate to an eternity of happily ever after. I wanted more stories, dammit!
In the following days the realization that formed, grew & burst upon my mind to fill me with murky darkness was this; all stories must end. I felt true & utter heart break. I have never grieved anything with more furvor than I grieved that day. Not my own tragedies, or human life or the horrors of the world. I faced perhaps the most profound truth in this world head on, & it broke me asunder.
One beautiful thing with books is that you can reread them, the magic doesn't fade from the pages completely, perhaps no matter how many times you turn them. But this truth is little solice to me personally, as I am one who is ever exploring & so very curious what what is new. Knowing that new thing too is also fated to death, this is the greatest realized terror of my life & the mere consideration of its utter inevitable is truth is the catastrophe central to all my conception & action in the world.
Sustainability as a conceptual alternative, an different mode for reality, is the most beautiful belief I can conceive of. That we can tell stories that tell new stories, or reread our living stories over & over again each time with completely fresh eyes. This heals my soul & restores my faith in existence.
Heaven might be a beautiful concept, but it may also be a phantom. It is I think something we should not wish for in absolute or need, as the nature of our current world is such that if we form it properly, it is ever telling a new story unfolding before us, one of us, that is potentially evergoing.
There is a concept in eastern philosophy, especially the Yogic tradition & Hindu belief. Atman is Brahman.
"Yourself, is the Divine Self."
We are the eyes of God living breath wondering upon the world immursed in the stories of ourselves. Heaven on Earth is on us, it's not a perfected crystal palace, but the world in which we can live sustainably & tell each other & also live, the best & most beautiful stories of ourselves.
Walk into a recent renovated & cleaned stain glass cathedral. It's not a foreboding Gothic place of oppressive reverence, but rather a bright, airy & joyous place. The man made cathedral mimics the nature of the true inner sanctuary. An old growth forest. Stained glass filters light much as leaves in the breeze do. Arches & columns mimic the towering trunks & arching branches of formidably ancient forest giants. Incense even mimics the musky & heavy scent of life roiling in vibrant decay upon the dampen earth. The alter a hilltop, blessings & purification rain. All that is symbolically important has its origins deep in the evolved world around us, life itself, all that has been upon the earth thus far, gives us this depth of experience & wonder.
I say this, because I do not despise the world. I see some in my feeds who do, with furvent religious zeal, & it saddens me. Suffering in this world doesn't bring heaven closer to us, only deepens the grip of hell upon the threads of our souls. Wishing it upon others, as if to purify them in some grand cosmic sense is a pitifully shallow black mark upon your own, & does nothing for the merit of what words & ideals are wrot upon your inner, deepest self.
"The greatest of these is love."
Discard faith if it challenges love, discard hope even. Cling to love more dearly than life itself. That was the lesson. The correct lesson in its own terms, but also the lesson I in myself learned across time. Some might say it leads astray, but I feel more found than anyone else I know. What is faith bonded in hate? Hope in the absence of compassion?
I grew up deep in the Christian tradition, & so have always felt a strongly engrained cultural connection to what considers itself the trad community on this site. But I'm not exactly of it. I care deeply about traditions as a living thing, not 'the tradition' as set in stone.
To truly save the world we need to question everything we consider unquestionable, but without losing ourselves along the way, & end prematurely in the journey. My sense is I want to engage more directly in consideration of belief, deep truths & the true nature of things in this world.
This was wonderful to write, as a personal essay & contemplation of self. I want to use lovely in regards to this as something of a philosophical manifesto, as to me it's a lovely summation of the root & ground of my own emotive journey in regards to fundamental philosophical & metaphysical truths. This blog is my own self & sanctuary where I speak from my inner being with gravitas & melodramatic intregue, but little sense of appealing to expectation or norms as set by culture or other people around me.
I wish there were more places in the world curated to be that for people, a grand & potent opening of the mind, not a wallowing in the dark recesses or a pretense of socially satisfactory & curated intellectualisms, but a careful, yet open unfolding of one's own truth. I hope that you, dear reader, value that in the nature of this blog as much as I do, & so enjoy the journey as much as I have so far, & will continue to, as I go forward.
🌳♂️ Masculine Way of Life!🧔🥊
