Fuel

Monday 20 February 2012

Pilmaiquen by Alfonso Maggiolo Peirano
It all depends on how you look at the shit.  When you return to places you did not want to return to, aversion can blind you.  Ask any Buddhist.  It's why you've been a festering angerpot and your friend, whose health issues are way more chronic than yours, rolls with everything that comes along, rolls with the pain, bears up under it.  Laughs at it.

Aversion can blind you to the kindling that is lies all over the ground in this space - in any of these sorts of spaces.  Each space that you don't want to be, every hell, contains its own fertile fuel to propel you forward out of there.

Thing is, you can't see it unless you sit down and rest.  Then your eyeline is low enough and suddenly you see it everywhere.  Detritus you left behind last time you were here.  Sloppy mishandlings, childish developments that created big monsters the first times you were here.  Ruts worn into the road from the countless times you have come back here and stamped your feet and bemoaned that you were going backwards again.  The ruts have countless pieces of kindling stamped into them, stamped into the magical, dry earth.  They are surprisingly easy to dig out with your fingers if you are willing to get on your knees and dig.

If you are smart enough to look at it in this way, with your head turned upside down and twisted 7 degrees to the right, you can see that everything belongs here, and everything is usable.  If you are not too proud to go backwards, it can all fuel you forwards.

It's just the way you look at it.


6 comments

  1. There's a lot of fire in this. Eloquent fierceness...

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  2. Thanks for this comment, Emma.  I was wondering if it made any sense at all.


    I am learning what the other sides of anger are.  When you have it frozen inside for a lot of years you don't get to experience the fire of it, how it is something that can flow through you and energise you to define your boundaries, all in ways that do no harm whatsoever to other people.  In ways even that people do not even realise - and you don't realise - that what you are feeling is anger.
    It's hard to explain, I guess :)  The good stuff is so hard to articulate sometimes :)

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  3.  Well I didn't say it made sense! But I personally am quite sure that sense-making is over-rated. It makes sense in that it reads as true, dug up from somewhere deep, and I respect that a lot. I read somewhere this morning that the imagination can only work on things that are not immediate - it seems true to me that sometimes you need distance or a different way of being (like sitting down to rest) to get a different view. It is how you look at it, as you say, and you can only look at it differently if you move.

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  4. Oh, that's even better that it reads as true, rather than makes sense!  :D

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  5. exactly so...I wrote about this in another way on my post today, but yes so much is about perspective.

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  6. Hey there Laura,

    Thanks for dropping by and commenting.  Do you have a link to your post so I can read and concur?  :)

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