Daily Meditations

[Rayn]

"Gay, Bi, Straight - these are just titles.  If you're going to love someone, love them." 

and this too...

"In the end, the struggle of mind and heart comes down to a small margin of choice. If the truth be told, we don't really govern many of the forces which shape our existence [....] We don't pick our parents. We don't choose our bodies, our talents, our temperament, or most of the other seminal elements that determine our fates."

I love these, Daniel, thanks.

Rayn

[Rayn]

"Meanness and the assaults of the world..." Can there be any better description for the death scene that Ennis imagines? Ennis has grown up with cruelty and learned to hide his emotions deep within himself. Now that a loved one has died, his memories of cruelty resurface and his imagination paints a scene of cruelty onto a situation already too painful to bear.

But what should he do now? His world has been shaken but no specific thought has risen to the top. As is often the case when a person is left confused and despairing after a tragic event, Ennis seeks aid from the divine - simply to know it, and share with it his grief, and perhaps for a short while understand the higher reasons for the tragic event.

The divine, however, may be experienced in many ways. Ennis seeks out both a source and target for divine compassion. Children often learn the most about God from their parents and associate the nature of the divine with their parents' nature. Ennis has lost his parents, but instead seeks out Jack's. This is an act of Faith, and one of the few that Ennis actively engages himself in.

While at the Twist ranch, he discovers the nestled shirts and in a dance of memory and revery loses himself. He struggles to smell the familiar scents and remember forever a presence passed on. In the end, however, he attempts to make amends with Jack's eternal spirit. If Faith in God is difficult, faith in one person as a spiritual, eternal being may be downright impossible. The struggle itself reveals faith and devotion, love and sincerity, hope and repentance.

This is remarakable insight, so true, but the most remarkable thing about such writing is that truth spoken,  spoken clearly and fearlessly by anyone reaches into the heart and touches us.  I am in Asia, yet you have touched me.   I'm sure your words will reach other people as well. 

Thank you again, Daniel.

[Daniel]

Jack: "Like to buy Jimbo a beer. Best rodeo clown I ever worked with."

The Five Stages of the Soul:

"We will dream our dreams in an awakened state."

Enchanted Love: The Mystical Power of Intimate Relationships:

"The fact that nothing is happening is the beacon light you've been searching for."

Beauty, the Invisible Embrace:

"The night breaks when the red fire of dawn is kindled and the world glows again in the beauty of color."

"I find by bearings where I become lost."
-Helene Cixous

"Imagine: if the mind of the politican and developer could awaken to the ancient integrity of landscape, it would become more and more difficult to damage the beauty of nature."

A thing is first and foremost itself. Seperated from his lover for over a year, Jack suffers from the pain of loneliness. This can be momentarity eased when he gives of his attention to Jimbo, though even this small gifting is non apropros and denied. I think, here, when Jack runs into the repeating frustration, he finally begins to understand the impoverished depth of his romantic and loving interest in Ennis. This revelation is stunning - it is the night breaking, the bearings of his loss. Jack now knows with certainty that what he had experienced with Ennis was real, if not complete.

This is also a moment of revelation about his true uniqueness. When a person can come to terms with himself as himself, it is at that moment when he is most capable of anything. Life offers no challenges to one armed with wonder and self-revelation.