Often, in the locations where one’s heart has been wounded by circumstance, thus seized by novel (even agonizing) apprehensions — new life, nourished by ash, will grow.
Have you ever walked through a field of bright wild flowers, risen from the charred ground, where a wild fire has blazed?
Over the last few years, many people close to me have died. A firestorm has run riot through my heart. In its wake, regions of my soul are vivid with eternity’s wild flowers.
The view is breathtaking.
History is a story of bitter grace and pain-wrought wisdom: In this tale, we learn: Collective trust is a catastrophic misjudgment, made possible by its partner in crime, an artist of legerdemain, who goes by the moniker, Hope.
Once you have had your heart shattered into pieces, and even though time has mended it back together, because all of the shattered pieces and scattered shards can never be retrieved, you, as a result, will never be the same.
[quote]room has been made within you for novelty and wisdom[/quote]
And that is a propitious development, because room has been made within you for novelty and wisdom. The process allows for transformation, for one remains oneself, as, all the while, alien elements are merged with one’s own uniqueness.
Accordingly, providence favors those whose faith has been shattered.
“A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
Life begins in mystery, what lies after life ends is unknowable — and, in between, we experience constant bafflement. Yet, how exquisite the landscape is as it rolls by; what exquisite sorrow we yield by being part of it all.
My best friend was plucked from this tormented world. My father died last May…I’m buffeted, shattered by circumstance, but Angela, my dear wife, is more than half way through the second trimester of pregnancy. The event has engendered much soul-searching for a certain father-to-be i.e., wandering in awe and bewilderment through the landscape of his psyche, and forays, in his better moments, into the image-rich landscape of Animus Mundi.
[quote]The heart is just a pump[/quote]
Art is merely artifice, if it is not sown from the soul’s veritable soil. What is the song of the night bird sans the night? A thousand gradations of green comprise a swamp’s canopy. The heart is just a pump, sans a loving/embattled (both are borne of libido) connection to the soul of the world.
My recent proximity to the realities of birth and death has forced me close to the living heart/inhuman abyss of the soul of the world. Yet amid this startling landscape the mind abides greater, even agonizing truths.
Climate chaos. Dying oceans. The degradation of U.S. corporate/militarist empire and the concomitant collapse of the global, neoliberal order. Our child will be born into a world where there will be a paradigm shift — or there will come mass tragedy.
My father was born on an Indian reservation. My mother escaped Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport, shortly after her father was taken to a concentration camp for anti-Nazi activity.
Angela, was born in a small, rural home, a sharecropper’s shack, in the South Carolina Low Country that housed generations of cotton-harvesters and tobacco-croppers.
Our people, sharing the fate of multitudes born into this world, have endured and even flourished under terrible conditions. The Tyler/Rockstroh whelp will be afforded the same opportunity. Who is his grim augury-prone old man to deny him the chance? That would be the very emblem of hubris, because, among the living, there exists no bottom line — only how you choose to write the book of your life.
“Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy, and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.” —Henry Miller
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City. He may be contacted at: phil@philrockstroh.com. Visit Phil’s website or at FaceBook.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
