TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

9:30 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Lying in bed listening to the snow fall.

A blissful silence after the endless gunshot fireworks and whistling rockets of the past few days. Berlin erupted at midnight into complete insanity, bursts of sparkling colour along every street, thickening veil of smoke over the ocean of smashed glass.

That's one way to see the new year begin. Had a low-key evening at Tammi's, enjoying the spectacle from a safe distance, dancing, and finally weaving through the carpet of spent cardboard tubes and spikey shards to get home around 3, the odd stray explosion still disturbing the ghosts. Long slow morning, catching up with the other side of the world, luxuriating in the bath, hauling buckets of coal from the cellar. It still never makes the room quite warm. I begin to understand this northern european longing for the sun. Although 35 degrees celcius at 10pm is a little extreme. Whiled away a few pleasurable hours reading the whimsical advice of Cary Tennis on salon.com, a beautiful mixture of poetic and pragmatic.

"There isn't some other life you could jump into if this one wasn't up to your standards. This is it... If our passionate delusion that we are in control of life's outcome were broken, that would indeed be a kind of triumph, even though, initially, we feel broken and weak.

Don't just move. Move toward what you love.

Here's the deal. We get out of our 20s, and eventually it dawns on us: We are not infinitely strong or infinitely capable of starting over. We are weakened by disease and death and bereavement. Things change us. We are shaped by life. There's no getting around it. This is the real thing.

And after we get through a particularly nasty episode of real life, we ask, Is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

Let's break out the booze, and have a ball."


And this, on the strange currents of desire:

"Your soul is a force, or being, that is part of you but not completely under your control. Like you, it has appetites and preferences, but unlike you it is not really very interested in getting stuff done.

Everybody out there has a soul that is drawn to certain qualities in the souls of others; not all these qualities are apparent to the eye, but the soul takes notice. There is a whole secret emotional and spiritual economy going on under the surface of everyday life.

These qualities are invisible to you.

Your soul and the souls of others are in constant communication.

Thus we go through life finding mysterious and sometimes fleeting satisfaction in encounters with others, much of it occurring beneath the surface. As we go buzzing about our big and important lives, a part of us is always seeking stillness, or strangeness, or the color red." Indeed, or all three.

A question always close to my heart:

"How do we reconcile creativity with the practical requirements of living?

To be blunt: Maybe we do and maybe we don't. But we start by being honest. We start with a self-correcting catechism of ego deflation: The world doesn't owe us a living. Instead, we owe the world. We have been entrusted with something.

The big picture is this: The debt is ours.
We got a little extra soup. We found money on the beach.

So welcome to the world. The world asks more of those in whom it has entrusted its gifts. It asks that we maintain a healthy standard of living plus devote many hours to music, practicing scales, and to art, drawing from life, working with color and meditating to keep the demons from revolt, and to writing nonsense that must be written, reading in search of wisdom or God, thinking, thinking, thinking -- and sometimes to more and stranger things: sleeping a lot to find peace, going on retreat, flirting with madness.

It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the world to do these things, to find ways to take care of ourselves, not to become a burden but to offer what we have. We must work hard at it. We must work steadily... We work quietly and steadily on our craft.

Have you ever seen kelp on the surface of the Pacific and marveled at how deep it goes, how far down in the dark, cold waters it is anchored on rocks and reefs and, who knows, sometimes on the hulks of shipwrecks? What we try to do is create surfaces that one feels are anchored deeply. You see the kelp bed, undulating in the waves, and you sense the depth of the water."

And finally, from C.S.Lewis, "We are what we believe we are."

Keep believing, keep trusting, keep imagining, and especially keep dancing! Enjoy the adventure of life as it unfolds around you with vibrant colours, unexpected tangents, and magnificent companions.