Love Letter 01
This morning, I awoke to two texts: a beautifully formed question on memory and suffering from Texas, and 30 statements written by Jack Kerouac on ‘Belief and Technique for Modern Prose’ from an island in the British Commonwealth.
I have hesitated in this space, on answering questions that aren’t mine through my writing.
I am not here (on this earth) to advise, but I have come to realize that I would love to show up and spend a slow dance with your thought to share here. With a mutual agreement in place, I’ll let go and open the door to regular collaborative prompt on the human experience. I honor that you keep sending them by agreeing to take this dance, darlings.
Repeat after me in your own words, and then let’s release it:
“I promise to understand you know nothing more than I do. Not bravery or adventure, a.b.v. or human consciousness, flowers, one-match bonfires, art, service or highways.
I promise to take what I want and violently burn down the rest. I will dance on the ashes of what doesn’t serve me and feel my own rain fall upon my own face.
I promise I have everything I need already within me.”
Thank you. That’s enough for me to get over myself and know that I am not fenced in, which is entirely my own trip.
Plus, Buffalo Springfield’s ‘Kind Woman’ just started floating down the hall and if the violet, mainstream arch of that doesn’t blot out pause in the human heart through a winter light, I don’t know what can.
x LDV
Texas, Kerouac and My Head On Your Shoulder: A Three-Voiced Reflection for the Human Heart
Texas:
Dear not-really from Texas,
I am glad you are finding home there.
I don’t turn my phone on until two hours after I wake up, which today meant at 7:20 I pushed a pen into the page on my lap in response to the last fragment of your question, ‘what do the enlightened do?’. My note read ‘first, acknowledge they are not enlightened. second, begin.’
Fuck if I know but I’ll sway with you for a while…
I was in a bath the other day listening to a meditation on forgiveness.
I didn’t mean to do a guided meditation in the tub that evening, I had thought it was just a talk and there were bubbles everywhere. We were asked to feel into all the multitudes of harm we have caused others in this lifetime through our actions. This took me a minute- because I’m coming to terms with an identity that in many ways felt most worthy of love because of the kindness it cultivated, but only a minute. The more I breathed I started to see first the broken hearts of incompatible lovers, and then maybe colleagues left to feel small by my raging need for non-conformity, and then the misunderstandings of family members who truly couldn’t see me and thus provide me the love I wanted. People I didn’t afford the opportunity of explanation left to grieve alone. Phew. That’s new. Alright, breathe.
Prompted by the speaker who works in both palaces and prisons, I visualized asking for their forgiveness for how I acted at that time from this place where I stand today with an open heart…
Kerouac:
number 7. Blow as deep as you want to blow. / 13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition. / 19. Accept loss forever.
Slowdance:
The room is as warm as I make it. The difference between a regular bar room and those with a dance floor is that in the latter the room moves in layers of opacity. The qualities of this moment move in and out of time as I run my hands across it. The gray blur of the far wall with leaning shadows and the squares of oil cloth floating somehow in a similar space. Yellow light freckled with moving silver squares and the wooden floorboards that disappear underfoot. Lovers as water, lovers as their own wind.
* * * * * *
Texas:
Dear Texas,
Through the experience of that asking I was able to open up to owning that intention is unpackable. I cannot carry it forward. Intention leaks, and like cool air rises up and away from all record.
Our second step was to turn toward small stories that came to mind where we were the ones who were hurt. Like a friend that bailed out for a spell to take care of their own needs, or someone insulting you with a humor that didn’t read the room. Recognize the difference between the actor and their actions as you offer them your forgiveness- as naturally as this came to you when you were on their side.
“We can forgive the actors and not have to forgive their actions,” he said, as I held a palm full of suds to my naked heart.
Kerouac:
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists in the mind. / 4. Be in love with your life. / 3. Try never to get drunk outside your own house.
Slowdance:
Red and white and yellow with silver leaking through. Red and white above the wood.
What also moves as we move is the picture of what we hold. I am your idea of me and you are touching that and waltzes are acts of prayer. This blessed, shifting terrain allows for the truth of that to live somewhere. This is the church of loving our own projection. I don’t know you even if I can hear Oklahoma sliding behind your teeth and it’s not only enough, it is transcendent. We acknowledge the mystery 3/4
Please don’t mistake this as a disassembly. I am a romantic, velvet woman, and being touched upon a dance floor is a celestial event. Mystery and energy. White roses and red. The not-knowing.
* * * * * *
Texas:
Dear Texas,
As you’d expect, the door has now been cracked open and we may move to denser and denser space within the crinoline of the heart.
“We can forgive the actors and not have to forgive their actions,”
I am sorry for your suffering and the way this weight has a hold on the space before your dreams. I have seen what your dreams can do and they are powerful. That you angered a city by expressing bliss in your anarchy with a limited liability company that thrived, that you materialized a partner who can somehow surpass your rate of systemic question balanced with intelligence and tenderness, and the god damn Cher story from your years in service that made me fall in love with who you are those years ago in Michelin-hell. I don’t know.
I have no fucking idea what the enlightened do. I show up. It is all that I do.
I hope that some approach, some form of attention becomes the devotion that helps you to stop giving your power away.
That’s all for now. Forgiveness, symbol and above all: Love.
Thanks for the sway, buddy.
x,
Lauren
