The House of Belonging

I awoke
this morning
in the gold light
turning this way
and that
thinking for
a moment
it was one
day
like any other.

But
the veil had gone
from my
darkened heart
and
I thought
it must have been the quiet
candlelight
that filled my room,
it must have been
the first
easy rhythm
with which I breathed
myself to sleep,
it must have been
the prayer I said
speaking to the otherness
of the night.

And
I thought
this is the good day
you could
meet your love,
this is the gray day
someone close
to you could die.

This is the day
you realize
how easily the thread
is broken
between this world
and the next
and I found myself
sitting up
in the quiet pathway
of light,
the tawny close
grained cedar
burning round
me like fire
and all the angels
of this housely
heaven ascending
through the first
roof of light
the sun had made.

This is the bright home
in which I live,
this is where
I ask
my friends
to come,
this is where I want
to love all the things
it has taken me so long
to learn to love.

This is the temple
of my adult aloneness
and I belong
to that aloneness
as I belong to my life.

There is no house
like the house of belonging.

~ David Whyte

Photo by Sara Ford on Unsplash

hear my name, take a good look…

(image: Crave)

Pearl Jam were just beginning to gain a national profile when they taped their Unplugged special at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens on March 16th, 1992. They’d just wrapped a grueling European tour and had little time to prep. “We literally got off the plane from Europe, spent all day in a cavernous sound studio in New York, and did the show that night,” said bassist Jeff Ament. “It’s pretty powerful, and Ed’s singing great. Yet it’s kind of naive, which is awesome.” The group later said they wished they had more time to put together a whole set of newly arranged songs like Nirvana would do late the following year, but it’s still an amazing look at a band just starting to realize their own incredible power and range. ~ ‘MTV Unplugged’: The 15 Best Episodes, Rolling Stone

Word-work.

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek – it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language – all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.

Toni Morrison, Nobel lecture, 1993