July22009
6/26/09 - Dinner with Sarah (Part II)
Chicken Lasagna Alfredo with Pecans and Raisins
Do you know this song? Sarah asked.
I shook my head.
It was Ray Lamontagne’s Be Here Now.
Don’t let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don’t try
Don’t let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there’s a strength that lies…
Be here now, here now…
Be here now, here now…
I listened to the words, and immediately thought of a passage I’ve been meaning to share from Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf. In it, Harry Haller was brought into a magic theater where he explored the unfulfilled possibilities of his life.
I lived through much in Pablo’s little theater and not a thousandth part can be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to take. Much love, much happiness, much indulgence, and much bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share. All the love that I had missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden during this hour of dreams.There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones that blazed, dark ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust, inward reverie, glowing melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I found women who were only to be taken by storm and those whom it was a joy to woo and win by degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if but for a moment, the voice of sex had called me, a woman’s glance kindled me or the gleam of a girl’s white skin allured me, emerged again and all that had been missed was made good. All were mine, each in her own way… Each had her secret and the bouquet of her soil. Each kissed and laughed in a fashion of her own, and in her own peculiar way was shameful and in her own peculiar way shameless. They came and went. The stream carried them towards me and washed me up to them and away…it astonished me to find how rich my life - the seemingly so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf - had been in the opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled before them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget them. But here they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one missing. And now that I saw them I gave myself up to them without defense and sank down into the rosy twilight of their underworld.
***
Sometimes, I told Sarah,
Sometimes I am so fixated on wrestling with a situation that in the moment, I become blind to what I can take from it. The more I look back, the more I see how often I have made things more difficult for myself by insisting on fighting imagined battles. If I can calm down enough to recognize the essence of each occasion, and focus on experiencing just that, I can live my magic theater every day.
I am thinking about all sorts of relationships, including but not limiting to romance. For one, I know that when I go home, it’s vital for me to trust the independence I have established and not worry about asserting my autonomy with my parents - for that is the biggest fear in going home, no? That you would revert to a child. I can be much more open to all that I want to learn from them without the struggling.
There is so much I hope to absorb during my time in Taiwan. I want my parents’ knowledge of food, their creativity, their vision, their passion. If I can remember to focus on those things, we will keep moving forward together and not be held back by petty arguments over facts already solid. The lessons are there, I don’t need to make up my own.
For this, and everything,
Be here now.
Take what can be given, give what can be taken.
