Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Taking Winged Shape

I want to be angelic. Here is a really good reason. I am nearly 100% certain that angel relationships are so much simpler. Sometimes the negotiations of relationship make me really tired. I know why at least some of us fail at relationships. We just get too tired. It shouldn’t be this hard, what my bones and sinews say. Music gives me the same trouble. It just shouldn’t be that hard to master the whole thing. Calculus, I couldn’t even start, even though I am supposed to be really smart, but calculus scared the shit out of me. I want to be angelic because I sense they don’t even have to try. I really, really want to not have to try.

I think I have heard this, that I am not making it up. Angels are complete and perfect creatures, limited in only one direction. They only possess a smidgen of free will, not the main meal that is ours but just a dash, a splash of it, like a good spice. Enough to make rebellion possible, but so rare that only a few have tried it and only one mustered enough to fall into rebellion completely and take some of the others with him.

Man on the other hand is required by his nature to rebel.

God loves Man best. Sometimes angels find that difficult, knowing that. It is said that is why Lucifer fell. God's love for man may be merciful but is not just from the angelic point of view. Lucifer fell for justice.

But Man’s work is the thing. It is so fucking hard.

Taking Winged Shape

That I should want this
thing with more than I ever
could gather from hills,
the grassy long sweep
of wind washed blades and flowers,
white starred stalks among
the green green old hills
of the far planet behind
my flight. That I should
want so much from this
sky into which I now go,
why I learned to fly.

March 9, 2009 1:41 PM

24 comments:

  1. Ahhhh Christopher....I love you!

    You speak my mind so well.

    xxx

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  2. Michelle, It may be a good thing there is half a world between us. Can you imagine two of you in the same room? Or two of me?

    But really I am sure we are not so alike, you an Aussie sheila, me an old San Jose, California unrepentent but undercover hippie. What we have in common, the mind and heart set that leads to alcoholism.

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  3. this is a fine aspiration... but I wonder if it's the fallible in us that makes us divine? I think this is some of what your poem means to me...

    thanks christopher... i enjoyed this post

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  4. Argh.....still, it would be fine for a moment or two :)

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  5. You know, for an old hippie, you still have lots of brain cells intact! Didn't hurt your heart, either...

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  6. Jon, it's the fallible in us that udergirds aspirations such as these. If I ache for a state of being, like successfully sprouting divine wings, the chances are high it is not something good for me in the broadest realistic scheme of things.

    It is too intimate to be anything but personal and singular with me.

    I am afflicted with a condition of malcontent. It arises as a state of bewilderment in its most simple form, a kind of unformed and innocent but immediate objection to the state of my life. It lies at the bottom of things for me.

    The deepest wisdom in my life is the first pause, instead of acting first, I must first pause and recall myself, then act. Because of this pause, I am always slightly behind in my own life.

    If I do not pause, everything goes wrong as I veer further from what is good for me. I call this an affliction and believe it leads more or less directly to alcoholism in my life. If I do pause, a kind of recovery is possible but at the cost of this hitch in the start of things that destroys my peace of mind before I even start. That is why it is all too hard. I must first accept this condition as my situation, like accepting something like diabetes.

    It exactly parallels in my soul a condition of my body. I am allergic to common sources of nutrition and must live a vigilant life in which in all innocence my peers can offer me sustenance which is in fact poisonous to me.

    This all takes place prior to any sense of belonging I may have. Further, I am soon conscious that not everyone seems to be discontent like this, and I am at peril for rejection if I try to express myself so deeply.

    But I wonder, now that I am actually singled out like this, hold a minority view like this, does it actually mean that my sense of isolation is universal after all, and is my condition not unique so much as I am unusually, perhaps uniquely awake to it? I have no answer except that I receive responses of recognition from some of you fellow travelers on the planet when I express facets of this as I can. Do I not then simply express the human condition at least for some humans?

    I was taught there are certain questions I am capable of asking, that I am not capable of answering. This is clearly one of them.

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  7. Michelle, it is one of my newest aspirations, to be rich and independent enough to just travel. It would then be my goal to reach France, Britanny, so I could have tea with Lucy and Mol and Tom, then reach Australia so I could get a real sense of our relationship, and of you and yours. Along the way I would veer to Whitehorse and Mendenhall to fool around with Rachel and Jozien. On the east coast there are Liz and Joseph, Karen and her family. There is Erin and her family up in eastern Canada.

    I look at the Feedjit map, how there is a band of connection, a steady readership of my blog even when not everyone adds to the comment stream. I wonder at this.

    This world seems to have people in it who are my people. This chance at connection is an utterly new thing in the experience of the planet, is it not? No other generation has jumped local conditions in this way. I say this in direct challenge to the naysayers who complain the computer is taking genuine connection away from us. We may lose something this way, but we gain as well.

    My friendship with you, Michelle, is one such gain.

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  8. Karen, it may turn out in the longest run that drugs weren't all that bad for some of us :)

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  9. It is our trying
    and failing
    and trying again
    that tell me
    i am alive.
    when i don't try
    and don't fail,
    well then,
    it is all over.
    Would i
    to be better at my failings
    and learn faster,
    yes
    but i am good with it.

    You are above me.
    xo
    erin

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  10. I love this. The last few days have revealed riches in the stream of comments. The best of conversations have been taking place here. Erin writes a poem. We tell each other quite sincerely that we love right across the planet.

    It doesn't get much better than this.

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  11. Oh my, it wasn't intended as a poem, just the shape it took. That you received it that way is my gift!
    xo
    erin

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  12. Poems sometimes hide their intentions. Outlaw poems.

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  13. I don't know, very few of the interpretations I've ever seen of angels have been particularly enticing. They're interesting and cool, but when it comes to limited and unlimited, I'll take human limitations and unlimitations rather than angelic ones.

    Plus, forgive my crassness, but I just love sexuality too much. o__o

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  14. Ah, but I should have mentioned, and forgot to say, that you build a beautiful vision with your poem. Flying over the landscape, that I can agree with, and you make me want it more. :)

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  15. I am certainly not an angel pusher.:)

    However, it might be nice to live without the bedevilments of self will inflicted on us, only enough self will left to spice things up.

    I agree with you, Joseph, on the usual pictures of angels that I see, like you they are far too cutesy and nice for my taste. Yes, not enough passion. However angels seem to figure in the Apocalypse too. There they take a different aspect.

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  16. I really believe that there are angels among us. I think they take human form and minister to us as we need. It may be that they're doing someone else's will, but I think they take great pleasure in giving. The ancients said that gods walk among us. Probably true, in very unexpected form.

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  17. oh, i try!
    i can even fly
    so what you say
    it makes me cry
    knowing i am no angel
    because if i was
    i would only know love

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  18. Karen I will not argue with you. I have not met one. On the other hand I believe that destinies are strange things and much of the way the world works relies on filters we see through. Take the filters off and the world turns out different. Sometimes I feel something like that is the difference between God's World, the Kingdom, and the world that God permits, the here and now.

    If there are angels they would protrude from God's World into ours and in that case may well remain invisible to all but the ones they are sent to.

    I have a myth about world balancing that I adhere to on alternate Tuesdays. Some of us are engaged in it, perhaps not knowing or understanding and we sometimes move around in strange ways that the human world doesn't self destruct. In this myth the balloon should have gone up a dozen times since I have been on the planet but it hasn't due to the dance of balance that critical players among us do. I don't mean the politicians, not at all. This sort of balance involves me going to Bend at the drop of some weird hat, or something off the wall like that.

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  19. Jozien :D Sometimes love is really tough.

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  20. Angels ... well if there is a Creator then there may indeed be angels, why not? Many creatures do not have free will as such. Free will is a function of self-awareness at least to some degree is it not? So perhaps angels do not suffer the constant dis-content that you describe because they lack the level of self awareness that we are burdened with.

    Can you imagine an angel becoming alcohol dependant? Perhaps if Lucifer had fallen in our times he too would have succumbed.

    In my mind angels are not cute, but kind of stern upright righteous creatures single-mindedly following the will of The Creator ... except when they don't, and as you say, that doesn't happen often.

    xx Jos

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  21. Jos!! :D

    I know your interpretation and I cheated a little in my picture. Most angels are not named, only archangels, I think. And I suggested that angels do indeed have a smidgen on self awareness, self identity, self will. Just enough. I think I have it right concerning Lucifer, that he rebelled because he could feel jealousy and he felt it over God's favoritism to man. But that couldn't happen without at least the tiniest self will conidition. And Lucifer was considerred the highest archangel before his fall.

    I cheated by adjusting my picture of angels to include this smidgen of self will. Or more like it, I have redrawn man as an experiment in radically increased self will, the horror of man and also the source of God's favoritism, for this makes man far more like God than angels can ever be. Men are true Sons of God in this way, and Jesus presumably only distinct in being God's First Son, not His only Son. This is of course the source of God's favoritism of man over angels, that man is far more a true descendant of God in his capacity to wake up.

    I only speak of course about Christian man and Christian angels...I don't know enough to characterize angels from the other faiths or for that matter man's descent from God :D

    From the Hindu point of view that I understand, I think of Man as already divine, a manifestation of the Divine soul, Atman, and Atman is fundamentally identical with Brahman, the source God. From the Buddhist point of view this is all beside the point. From the Taoist point of view Man is the third in the divine Trinity, Heaven, Earth and Man and as such is already perfect if awakened completely, the whole point of the Taoist practice.

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  22. I think humans love perfection and fantasy more than anything. In the quest for perfection & fantasy, we create a lot of complicated things and to make it simpler to accept - give it God's name or require it to have God's blessing.

    :) We live, we die and in between we enjoy each others company & hate it too, we enjoy working hard with the rewards & curse it too, half our lives we dream of getting married to our soulmates & the other half we spend hoping we could do the first half over. :D

    God loves Man for his imperfection. I think it's safe to say, love and justice don't bother with each other.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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