The Shifting Width of Time

Friday 14 August 2009

I am rather sick of everything at the moment. Perhaps it is just the August blues, I'm not sure. But everything feels sort of tight and constricted.

It amazes me when I'm feeling like this how different time feels. Everything feels so small and flat and too close together. I have three days off ahead of me and it feels too small. Tuesday looms big even though there is a Saturday, Sunday and a Monday before it. Three whole days!

I can't stand feeling like this. I can't stand feeling like I am living in the middle of a dying society. That sounds dramatic but take a look around and tell me how often you see anyone laughing in the streets, or even smiling. This world is so heavy, it kills me. Everybody reading this post is amongst the richest people in the world, who have occasion if desired to entertain themselves mindlessly, and how often in an average week do we all feel the transcendence? God, how long? How long how long how long how long? Or is this it? Just an inexorable slow slide down? Is that how it ends for us?

Forgive me my doom and gloom. But I don't get told no nice stories. I just get told what I need to buy. I say to myself that I know better, that I tell myself good stories on the inside. And it helps. But they say that the brain doesn't even recognise the difference between something real and something imagined. Something as flexible and childlike as that surely listens and takes on board the dumb culture stories even if it knows that they are empty. Somewhere, somehow.

I need a campfire and a storeyteller.

Okay, then. I feel dead but I'm going off to do life-affirming things that my inner psychotic flatpack bitch says seem just a little bit too fun and that therefore maybe there's a rule against them. Things like playing with some clay, playing some music, cooking something, watching some footy, watching a movie, doing some yoga, walking my dog, maybe catching up with my mum and my cousin tomorrow, going to impro on Sunday night. I don't even feel like doing any of those things because none of them seem like they will be enjoyable because right now I feel dead. This is how I feel after a week of typing shit about pointless court cases and living in a country that keeps consuming its own head and whingeing about the climate and insisting we live in an economy that must keep growing and which never tells me anything about myself that is transcendent. What about God?

Sigh. So I feel drained and dislodged from living in this fucked-up place. I hate it. But I just know from too many occasions that I will go off into the playroom and start messing about with whatever I'm doing in there, and the slowdown will start somehow. I could not believe with my own soul that such heaven and such hell can exist in the exact same day for one person depending on what thoughts are going through their head. It sort of dumbfounds me.

So anyway, even though things seem rather glum, I'm trying to ignore those feelings and not give them the weight they are screaming at me to give them. They are, after all, shifting perceptions. When I'm swimming in the silk, enfolded within a song, riding the sunlight, things can seem very different very quickly.

Could do with a bonk, though. Seriously, they say it's like riding a bike. Is that true? Cos it's been a long time ...

7 comments

  1. I'm sorry to read that you're down, and things look so bleak. I know that feeling. Sometimes I think I was born on the wrong planet, or, at least, born in the wrong century.

    I like that line "I need a campfire & a storyteller". It doesn't seem like there's many of us, in this fast paced word, who appreciate that simplicity.

    While searching for something in the Message bible, this morning, I ran across the lines about salt and light - how, we're to be the light, "bringing out the God-colors in the world". Those last words made me think of the colored pencils you bought, & gave the homeless artist. I bet they were God-colored pencils! (Now, that's a nice story, Sue).

    I hope things look brighter, and the weight of the world, is lighter.

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  2. Sherry - "bringing out the God-colors in the world." That's so beautiful. And thank you for telling me a nice transcendent story about myself! You're very wise :)

    I am feeling a little better this morning, thank you. I was chatting to Erin by email yesterday (I hope she doesn't mind me repeating this but it was so lovely I want to share it.) I was telling her that when I feel like this, sometimes it feels like I am mourning for the world to God, and it feels like a prayer, you know? And I said, that is maybe casting a romantic spin on it. And Erin said "I think mourning and a prayer are very good descriptions for the weight, and not romanticized at all...though I do think it's romantic that God gives us these notions, like partnering with him." I love that because I think it's true. I love it that God's thoughts are candlelight thoughts.

    I guess that's why sometimes I get so sick of the fucking fluorescent, you know???

    Mike - thank you, my dear :) Thanks for swirly parentheses instead of the boring curved ones. Nice ;)

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  3. That's a wonderful remark of Erin's! She may very well be right, I think. Just read the second half of Romans 8 again - Paul's been feeling very much like you, I imagine. What Erin's describing is so much the intercessory side of contemplative prayer, isn't it? Prayer that goes beyond asking God for specific things, and just comes to him for his mercy, with all this pain of the world's on its heart. Prayer that just climbs into God's lap and weeps all over his shoulder!

    If that's romantic, then fine - but like Erin says, it's certainly not romanticized!

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  4. Aww thanks hon. It is romantic...I mean God is love, who says that has to be a sterile love? Why can't it be romantic?

    I mean I get the men who say they hate the "Jesus is my boyfriend" crap, and that's not what I mean at all...can't we have romance without sexuality?

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  5. "can't we have romance without sexuality?"

    Right on, Erin... certainly the metaphysical poets and the pre-Raphaelites thought we could!

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  6. Mike and Erin - wonderful stuff :) I absolutely agree, Mike, that intercessory prayer has this element. This ongoing continual element of life death and rebirth, this great cycle that is repeated in so many areas, like creatively, and in the seasons etcetera.

    Romance without sexuality - yeah, nice :) There is a certain sensuality, may I say, also, a non-sexual sensuality :)

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