Meditation 3: Love, et al...

Reckoning My love is no short year's sentence. It is a grief lodged under the skin, strength pushed beyond its bounds, the four quarters of the world, the highest point of heaven. It is a heart breaking, or battle with a ghost, striving under water, outrunning the sky, or courting an echo. -- An Unknown Irish Woman

Sonnet 30 When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe, And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before.       But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,       All losses are restored and sorrows end. -- Shakespeare

Discordants Music I heard with you was more than music And bread I broke with you was more than bread. Now that I am without you, all is desolate, All that was once so beautiful is dead. Your hands once touched this table and this silver And I have seen your fingers hold this glass. These things do not remember you, beloved: And yet your touch upon them will not pass. For it was in my heart you moved among them And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes. They knew you once, O! Beautiful and wise! -- Conrad Aiken

Poem I suppose other people endure the same disatisfactions-- I suppose they all think that nobody understands them; I suppose they think words are no good, and that anyway       one can never say what one means. That is where sex comes in, the arch-deceiver. Sex deludes one into the belief that one has attained       real contact with another person; And since the horrible loneliness of the soul makes one       crave for some contact, One turns gratefully to sex as a short-cut to contact. But it isn't true, it isn't true; yet what is true? Is it true, ever, to say "I love!" with its implications, Knowing that the truth wears quite a different face for       oneself or another? Yes, it may be true to say "I love", but in the last resort There is no possibility of contact, except in a brief delusion. -- Vita Sackville-West

Journal Index Meditation 1: Ties, Men... Meditation 2: Storytelling...