And mommy got a date with herself on Sunday. Even got to gussy a little... For the Opera. Thanks to family gifts and a free moment and a willingly game husband who traded off my opera afternoon for a bike afternoon the day before.
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| Oh I know I'll get me home by curfew... mostly |
...And then decided to take my request that he start the water for Chaya's bunny mac and cheese (which she eats every night albeit in different shapes for variety's sake, and we accept this and let's move on...) by deciding to make fancy mac and cheese from scratch, Chaya's mac and cheese from box AND an apple pie. At least he consented to buying pre-made macaroni instead of making his own pasta. For the record, he does NOT do this very often. I do 90% of the cooking and our cumulative baking experiences are largely helping our parents at holidays.
Let's say, it was interesting coming home to a fully employed kitchen laden with recipes and ingredients and hot bubbling things while my husband stood at the stove with my daughter basically lavishly layers of loose flour all over his pants and SCREAMING as he attempd to prevent her from leaping into any of the burning objects
Food did occur, so kudos. the apple pie had some snags... but the caramelized sugar sauce that made it on top of the pie was a hit.
And we continue the dressing up excitement. In the last week alone she's been a butterfly, a snake, a bunny, a pointy star that is yellow because all pointy stars are yellow, a superhero, and a pig in the mud. This is when she's not just getting all fashion forward by insisting various bedding and toiletries be fixed to her body however possible.
We've also stuck stickers on skeletons, learned to "golf" with pirate puppets, put faces on more pumpkin cut outs than you could populate a small paper patch with, and pasted some more abstract decorations (my favorite of which looks like a demon popsicle) to the wall.
We're all in.
On Saturday, Chaya got to break her butterfly costume out of mothballs for a big day of festivities and will take it off again some time next year maybe... when it falls off of her in tatters.
Our first Caspar Babypants in Seattle. Incidentally the first time either Andrew or I had been to the Neptune (huge music venue in the U-District) despite having been young and occasionally hip in Seattle.
They didn't have the same big designated mosh pit that our regular venue has, so it took some time for the kids to all get out and dance their Pirate Booties off, but it did happen eventually.
After returning from this (and a car ride of screams about being "hungry" in a "I will never eat at home, I would STARVE first... well, wait, do we still have Kinder Eggs at home?" voice) and eating the lunch Chaya swore she'd never deign to compromise on, we re-emerged into the Monster Mash and attended a "Halloween Carnival" at her preschool.
Things I've learned: (1) my daughter is still young and cute enough to cheat her ass off at all carnival games and end up with more prizes than a legit winner would, (2) my child cannot throw. At all. So much for that baseball scholarship,
(3) but she likes golf, which she plays a bit like hockey before saying "F it, you just throw the ball in the hole and then jump in after it. (4) little dancing queen will boogie down anywhere at anytime.
She putatively was given a short "naptime" to recover from the morning and regroup for the afternoon. She chose not to take it. She was unhinged - a seething pustule of unchecked desire and rage - by the evening. She wanted to wear the giant quilt. She wanted me to sit on the train of the quilt because she, herself, in her quilt was, in fact, a train. She then wanted to pull me while I sat on the train, because that's what trains do. She howled because "I can't do that very well." Then things got serious. I don't even know what she wanted, but she was not getting it. Attention, candy, golf courses on the moon, things to just friggin' work out, handstands, fairy wings... never to sleep again but to always feel rested... At a certain time I've learned that nothing will satisfy and the best I can do is be present, limit the stimuli and let that pain run its course. Good trick for my own self-care arsenal perhaps.
I remember a few months back Chaya was utterly unconsolable. When I asked her what was wrong she said "I want something that I can't have." Human condition summed up rather perfectly by my little butterfly and oh how it resonates watching her sit and struggle with that truth.
The explosion of pathos when Chaya doesn't get what she wants brings home the visceral forces that move within us constantly. I don't think that Chaya's desires are any more gripping or fervent than her parents', though she has not learned to muddle and manage them (or the complex interplay of several desires at once). She lives in the moment and lets go after the moment in a way that is a bit admirable.
Life is desire. Noble and ignoble - selfless and selfish - big and small - necessary and frivolous - salutory and destructive - but all desire.
The sum aim of desire perhaps is "it all" more than any one object. Within life, we're rocked by tumults of conflicting and contrasting urges and thirsts, each of which hold a key to some greater totality. Desire is a life force that runs through it all prodding through some combination of pleasure and pain and saturating all other sensations and feelings.
Perhaps the direction veers. Perhaps the objects clash. Satisfied, the force of desire either changes course or intensifies. It comes in necessary cycles that hit the rhythms of life and starts from survival. Feeding, digesting, and hungering. Sleeping, dreaming, waking, moving, tiring and sleeping. Attraction, pursuit, consummation, reproduction, tending, affection, and yearning again. Curiosity, study, understanding, mastery and curiosity again. High and low. Creation and destruction.Telling one story, concluding, and then promptly craving to add another coat of meaning. Always. Building and falling and building again.Where one craving fades in a glut of excess, the energy shifts but it continues to burst through with primal force.
We are all like Tantalus. We are all thirsty for the true goods, but we all drink dreams.
Paul Kristeller
Tantalus. We all know too well the burn of unquenchable thirst literally and metaphorically. But it would in some sense be more honest to the human condition if Tantalus were allowed the smallest sip of water when he leaned down and just the fuzz of peach upon his lips. Just enough to give the taste and perpetual hope of relief. A sip to stir instead of slake.
In life our own desires self limit by their own multitude. To gulp one desired drink means to lose another - possibly to hurt ourselves or others or simply make compromises we don't fancy. The extra burn of desire is that we often must choose to let it go unquenched in what feels like self-inflicted torture, but is simply preservation of some other cluster of desired outcomes. When we both may have and may not have, how the desire writhes.
Fantasy has broad meaning and purpose, but on some basic level it is also the thing that conjures some small sip of what cannot otherwise be had. Safely and not so safely at the same time. Fantasies aren't particularly gripping when they're too far removed from the solid, and that hint of could-be. I can spin happy imaginary lives of wealth and success and unparalleled fortune, and certainly do, but even then my mind begins to readjust the fantasy to present reality. The most fantastic things settle into metaphor or shift fully into the realistic vernacular with just little twists of fate. Wishes fulfilled, but not too easily. With a sense of bargained trade off between the possible and impossible.
My mind seems to force its endless creations to fit into the realm of the almost-possible. Given that the brain processes many aspects of fantasy as if it were happening in the outside world, it almost makes sense to merge them. As if the convincingly real fantasy may plausibly cross that divide into actuality.
The plausible and the incremental creep of wanting/willing as it forges into that space of the tangible. I can want the stars and easily accept I'll never attain them (and would burn to a crisp attempting to own them), but it's every little step towards the sky that really grabs in its vernacular of yearning.
Often, I find myself thinking "if only..." and following up with the smallest little variation on extant circumstances. If only I had a little more of this. If only there were less of this to deal with. If only somebody could see this or hear this one true thing. If only I could communicate such and such or truly know such and such. If only some little boundary in life could nudge itself just a smidge left or right.
I think it and feel it over and over again, knowing that just as often every "only" satisfies itself for some short time before becoming bolder and deeper, and more painful. I want to a straining point of will, only held in check by a mix of fear and reason and a blend of conflicting wants from the abstract haze of desire.
On the other end, there's the repression and denial of a desire that cuts more deeply with its acid stigma and feeds just as deeply... Desire continues, but unaware of its course we have even fewer resources to manage or direct it.
Even transcendent desires - the peace of spiritual congress in meditation or prayer- are accompanied by a fall to earth and a greater yearning for that sense of unity/transcendence/divinity.
Sicut cervus desiderat ad fontes aquarum, ita desiderate anima mea ad te Deus.
The desire to transcend desire becomes itself an overwhelming one, even as it stokes individual desires in its taboo.
You cannot deny desire any more than you can satisfy it. Desire will have its course and cut its canyons, in some ways - whether it is indulged or not. Its force can only be ridden with more or less agility.
“To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.”
―
Ridden... Squeezed through skill and technique into pure creation born of that ultimate animating energy... But all the skill in the world can't master or contain it.. The expression of desire becomes its own intoxicating spritz of the waters below. There's a line quickly crossed between naming, understanding, and fantasizing/creating. Acknowledge that you are hungry and you've named something. Naming makes it easier to understand any array of physical and emotional sensations. Naming helps you plan your steps in that context. Go into any further detail about the food you crave and the experience of eating, and you will conjure with your words and image ideas that trigger the digestive process and land on every taste bud in the telling. A reverie and a torture that could ultimately paralyze in the troughs of descriptive force.
But oh those fantasies and the poetry they create...
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| Colin Moody 319 |
Much of life lingers in that aching balance of unslaked thirsting for little droplets that mix heaven and hell in every whetting gulp. Fantasy goes where it will go held in check by its own agendas of desire and hesitation, more or less in swirling dances with reason. Creating its own blissful satisfactions and gut churning dissatisfaction. Stoking every system to prepare for a sating the body and spirit will never entirely receive.
“Desire is half of life; indifference is half of death.”
―
And yet, life without desire is stasis and decay. Desire is the force of being, mixing the pleasure and pain that define tangible existence. It moves us towards creation, towards beauty, away from harm, towards connection and justice as much as the converse.
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| Bougereau |
Human existence lays somewhere in the in between. The conscious choice of balancing at some threshold, and navigating the different undertows and white waters. Of holding the tension and teetering the totality of wants and needs against the specificity of any pressing proximate yearning with some mindful flexibility. A mental universe of distractions and diversions, of nibbles and sips and hands rapidly passing over the eye of the flame.
“None of the great religions have done more than exclude, throw out a long range of prohibitions. But prohibitions create the desire they are intended to cure. We of this Cabal say: indulge but refine. We are enlisting everything in order to make man's wholeness match the wholeness of the universe--even pleasure, the destructive granulation of the mind in pleasure.”
―
It is a gift and an agony to be denied the opportunity to take a pleasure for granted. As much as we can cultivate gratitude and live in the moment, external circumstances tend to do it for us better. When we have that small taste (those moments of "flow" in a difficult sport, that momentum of creation, the discovery of truth and beauty,, the sense of connection with a chance companion, those quiet split seconds of perfection in a deep breath, the warmth of the very last squeeze of a goodbye hug), fire lights the shadow of the furthest nook of mental frontiers.
In that fire, the awareness is unmatched. Every raw nerve and sensory organ is primed to take in the suddenly unfamiliar world around us. There is a treasure in this vantage point. Like the smell of food cooking when you're hungry, it carries its upper chords heaven over that pleasurably chilling tritone or two. It makes the entire world vivid and - for a moment - unsticks the hedonic adjustment that blinds us from the dazzle of all that we do have and shaking our suppositions about the greater picture of needs and bigger desires.The empty space a strong desire highlights leaves an open spot inside and the vacuum energy pulls in ways that can be directed.
Perhaps mindfulness is more about clarifying desires and getting a deeper kick from each small taste in the thoroughness of experience. I could crawl onboard with that. A drink of alcohol will rip right through my body, but a small smell and an infinite contact high as it lingers on my lips and tickles my nose hairs, stirring some minor reflex intoxication response, hits some deep indulgent notes.
... and in the pain itself. The pain of yearning and the inevitable (in this life) pain of loss that holds its own value.
I think it becomes easier to both embrace and understand desire to realize that pain is not necessarily to be avoided anymore than pleasure is always to be pursued. Both have meaning and both have purpose. Both are inevitable and come in a variety pack of duration, intensity and significance. The ultimate goal of life should not always be to maximize your pleasure-to-pain ratio. But to let each serve as prods for growth and a certain kind of depth and color of experience. To feel both with an open self and take the lessons offered within.
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| Kathe Kollwitz |
Pain is an aversive spur to action in one sense - the stick to pleasure's carrot - but it is also meaningful and powerful (and sometimes even pleasurable in its own right). When it sets in more deeply as hurt, people may drown in it, but they may also plunge depths unimaginable and emerge more deeply connected to themselves and that universe that holds them.
Sometimes when you "let go" of hurt it doesn't fly away like a monarch who dropped into your life for a short flutter. Sometimes it's simply taking your hands away from something snuggled deep in your soul. Simply letting it unfold in all its dimensions of meaning and compassion and forming one magnificent tapestry of feeling and experience. And when a chance trigger of smell or sound or word sparks that deepest corporal memory, its embodiment will glisten and dazzle even as it stings. Sometimes it will throb unexpectedly and to the point of tears, but all the world will follow in its wake; you will know what fires have forged you and what fortunes you've held in each ache.
Which brings us back to Chaya. Who may understand this in small dribs and drabs even now, though she won't put words to it just yet.
Chaya: Mommy come baaaaaaaaaaaack!
Mommy: No, honey. You were hurting me and that is not ok.
Chaya: Mommy I want to hit you.
Mommy: You are allowed to want that, but it is my body and I have final say. I'm not on board with having pain be inflicted on me... well...
... I mean... that's another conversation for when you're way way older...couple of really different conversations. Way older.
Chaya: Okay... I want a Kinder Egg!! Mommy get me a Kinder Egg. Please?
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