When I was younger I thought going through something rough would be fun, or uplifting somehow. That sounds odd, but it was how everyone portrayed terrible things. You go through this horrid experience, and suddenly you’re a better person. I wanted that; everyone wants to be a better person.Now, though, after all of this, I realized that wasn’t true. Not all the time, at least. Suffering didn’t make a person stronger. It didn’t make character, or mold someone into a better part of themselves.It could—don’t get me wrong, it could. It could make someone see the light, see the world through a clearer vision. It could change everything. It could make people good and courteous, make them spend their lives trying to save others’. Their past could lead them to something brighter in the future, creating the theory that everything happened for a reason. It could make them grateful for their life instead of hateful, scornful, wishing they were never born.But it wasn’t like that for me; I didn’t get better. For me, all pain ever did was hurt.
An anchorite’s hermitage is called an anchor-hold; some anchor-holds were simple sheds clamped to the side of a church like a barnacle to a rock. I think of this house clamped to the side of Tinker Creek as an anchor-hold. It holds me at anchor to the rock bottom of the creek itself and keeps me steadied in the current, as a sea anchor does, facing the stream of light pouring down. It’s a good place to live; there’s a lot to think about. The creeks are an active mystery, fresh every minute. Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection. The mountains are a passive mystery, the oldest of them all. Theirs is the simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.
He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.
Keep going, keep going, keep going! You're going to have crappy days, you're going to have days where you lose vision or confidence. You're going to have those days were everything seems 1 step forward and 3 steps back. You're going to have unexpected chaos and turmoil. Are you going to let that derail you? No. You've made a firm decision to go after your dreams. That firm decision means to keep going no matter what. Life doesn't just stop and nor should you. You know you want something, that you truly want something, if you're willing to endure all the pain and grief along the way. You either make a decision or you don't. If you do, that means sticking by it. Riding it out. Don't give up. All things have good and bad. There is no easy street. Everything good takes work. If you want a better life, you have to work for it. Some days it will be easier work than others. Accept that. Work with it. Keep going!
HANNAH: You had a vision.PRIOR: A vision. Thank you, Maria Ouspenskaya. I'm not so far gone I can be assuaged by pity and lies.HANNAH: I don't have pity. It's just not something I have.(Little pause)One hundred and seventy years ago, which is recent, an angel of God appeared to Joseph Smith in upstateNew York, not far from here. People have visions.PRIOR: But that's preposterous, that's...HANNAH: It's not polite to call other people's beliefs preposterous.He had great need of understanding. Our Prophet. His desire made prayer. His prayer made an angel. The angel was real. I believe that.PRIOR: I don't. And I'm sorry but it's repellent to me. So much of what you believe.HANNAH: What do I believe?PRIOR: I'm a homosexual. With AIDS. I can just imagine what you ...HANNAH: No you can't. Imagine. The things in my head.You don't make assumptions about me, mister; I won't make them about you.
I've helped many friends and even strangers, start successful businesses, by encouraging their ideas, reshaping such visions and giving them a clear image to hold on to. But in the end, they forget me easily. I've noticed that they rather have the ones that didn't support them around them. They prefer to forget me as fast as possible when success is acquired. And why? Because the ego is always stronger than the spirit. And the ego is ashamed to admit its defeat, to say thanks and appreciate. The weak don't know that it is the spirit that calls them for success, and not the ego. With the ego, you go nowhere. And being very religious will never help with that. Simply because God can't do much for those who are blind by their ego. And yes, I've also met many incompetent but highly religious individuals that fail in life with the grace of God, proving that the God of life and success is not the God of the fools and most selfish. This duality confuses only the most egotistical. The plans of God are so very clear that He could be dead and they would still work as I outlined here.
If asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or the supernatural?’, I can only answer somewhat as follows. I do believe in another world which penetrates this, and that, as Milton so aptly puts it, ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth/Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep’, I deplore the false Cartesian split as a dreadful blow to the human mind. To me, the world of imagination, which works by means of analogy, is as real, in its own particular way, as the everyday external world. To me, the myths are vital truths, the gods and goddesses still live, on that mighty archetypal plane which lies beyond our little selves and yet within our being, too. Now this may appear illogical, a tangled web of contradictions. To believe in every spiritual truth, in all religions and all creeds, to revere a single God and the many? This may disturb the theologian, but not the Mystic. For, to the mystical turn of mind, the One may become the Many, the Many One. Spiritual and poetic truth—the transcendental vision, that is—encompasses both reason and ethics, yet soars above them.
In my contact with people I find that, as a rule, it is only the little, narrow people who live for themselves, who never read good books, who do not travel, who never open up their souls in a way to permit them to come into contact with other souls -- with the great outside world. No man whose vision is bounded by colour can come into contact with what is highest and best in the world. In meeting men, in many places, I have found that the happiest people are those who do the most for others; the most miserable are those who do the least. I have also found that few things, if any, are capable of making one so blind and narrow as race prejudice. I often say to our students, in the course of my talks to them on Sunday evenings in the chapel, that the longer I live and the more experience I have of the world, the more I am convinced that, after all, the one thing that is most worth living for -- and dying for, if need be -- is the opportunity of making some one else more happy and more useful.
In the past I had often tried to escape the grown-up world of sorrow through my imagination- dreaming that a handsome young lieutenant would ride to my rescue or that a great empresario would discover my musical talents and whisk me away. I had envisioned knights in shining armor and happily ever after scenes to escape from rules or boredom or pain; including a vision of my mother walking through our front door whole and well again. Now I knew that a lifetime of escape led to a life like Aunt Bertie's. My imagination was a gift, but I had to live in the real world. My eyes had been opened this summer to poverty and crime and abuse and I needed to use my imagination not to escape, but to help people like Irina and Katya, to make my own contribution as the women in the women's pavilion had done. I couldn't do it in the same way Jane Adams and my grandmother and Aunt Mat were, but I would find my own way and my own time.
The poem or the discovery exists in two moments of vision: the moment of appreciation as much as that of creation; for the appreciator must see the movement, wake to the echo which was started in the creation of the work. In the moment of appreciation we live again the moment when the creator saw and held the hidden likeness. When a simile takes us aback and persuades us together, when we find a juxtaposition in a picture both odd and intriguing, when a theory is at once fresh and convincing, we do not merely nod over someone else's work. We re-enact the creative act, and we ourselves make the discovery again......Reality is not an exhibit for man's inspection, labeled: "Do not touch." There are no appearances to be photographed, no experiences to be copied, in which we do not take part. We re-make nature by the act of discovery, in the poem or in the theorem. And the great poem and the deep theorem are new to every reader, and yet are his own experiences, because he himself re-creates them. They are the marks of unity in variety; and in the instant when the mind seizes this for itself, in art or in science, the heart misses a beat.