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Kenna Burima's avatar

Dear Jack, I am always so pleased when I see another offering of yours in my inbox. Reading your words and the eloquence of your readers’ comments too allows me to feel less alone in the spot I find myself in. It’s a strange one as a life long constant doer; mother, musician, and teacher and and and…but I have driven myself to the end of the road of worth defined through endless doing. So what now? I’ve been asking or I suppose, rather pleading…WHAT NOW? I haven’t found answers (I wanted to add “yet” but it seems I cannot) but I am somewhat relieved to read your words and know that my compulsion of figuring shit out isn’t all that uncommon.

It’s been quite the unraveling of which it only seemed natural at the end of the last string, I would find a God I didn’t give much thought to in my former life. Even now, as I acknowledge something was there through my ecstatic musical experiences and equally ecstatic addictions embraced by my industry, I am surprised that this…desire for silence and darkness is so strong.

I just want to share that your line “I got lost. I turned back. That is more than sufficient,” brought on a sensation of truth (capital T perhaps?) that only my body seems to be able to communicate these days. A part of me is sad to know it to be true and also heartened to know maybe it is enough. So thank you. And thanks to everyone here as well. It’s a lovely little community of wordsmiths that I enjoy immensely feeling a part of. All the best, Kenna

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Peco's avatar

Thanks, Jack, for this beautiful reflection. Funnily, I never see the point of stopping for the silence and stillness, until I stop, and then it becomes clearer. I see how all the little words in my head, like lenses, amplify or distort bits of reality at high speed, often in the most selfish of ways. It is so strange, this contradiction of silence and words that accompanies us everywhere.

The Arsenios option, of fleeing distraction and ambition, and seeking stillness, is one that I find only in bits and pieces in my banal middle-class existence. The Machine is one thing; children, work, myriad worries about everything from finances to mini-crises, etc., are a whole other category of distraction (and often more immediate).

And yet it seems the Option is doable, in small ways, by slowing down, simplifying life, and by laying the words to rest a little, and allowing something else to rise. I’m not saying I’m very good at this, but the difference is striking. Sometimes confusing. How can life be so split, between the world of words and of doings, and the world of silence and stillness?

I don’t think it’s within human power to heal the split, though sometimes we experience glimmers of union. Still, one wonders, and tries.

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