The Line Between Solitude and Loneliness Is Often Difficult to See

the line between us is so thin I might as well be you...
Robyn Hitchcock

We live as we dream, alone.
Joseph Conrad

...the line between solitude and loneliness is often difficult to see, and nearly impossible to map...in fact, it’s all too easy to spend much of a life stumbling and lurching along that line like a drunk pulled over at three in the morning, falling clumsily to one side or the other...

...kinda like the tug o’ war between belonging and standing out from the mass...the desire to fit in and the fear of denying, or even losing, parts of oneself, becoming smaller, or less than one could or wants to be....crammed into a narrow, proscribed mold for the sake of acceptance...like a puzzle piece, others pushing in on all sides, each in their own very narrow, form-fitted space, proscribed yet snug...no wiggle room, nowhere to move to...except, perhaps, for those along the edges, but they face the outside with straight, rigid borders...

...hmmm...not sure what I think of how that last metaphor ended up...don’t know if I agree with myself at all...

Any definition is a limit.
Wendell Berry

...yoga, they say, is something that encourages opening to every aspect of oneself...along with a radical acceptance of those around you....but any identity, including that of yogi can easily slide into only more dogmas and narrow roles...exclusive cliques based on brand names, beliefs, or hard butts...or the idea of being open and accepting...but that doesn’t mean it has to....words can have many definitions, some far more or less limiting than others...and maybe some can slip outside their definitions completely...


*this post started as a comment on Brooks’ aptly renamed Yogic Muse blog...and the artwork up there is by Liu Bolin...google 'im*

Painted Fire

Words are only painted fire; a look is the fire itself.
Mark Twain

...a while ago, most excellent yoga blogger Brooks wrote about an article in The Sun magazine by Wendell Berry called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer...having read both, I left a comment...which, as my comments tend to do, veered away into rambling that had very little to do with what I was commenting on....now, in the spirit of Earth Day, I’m gonna recycle part of it here, while, as Yoga for Cynics posts tend to do, rambling on even further....

...I like to think of myself as a Luddite...with a blog and an ipod...but no air conditioning, and a cell phone that doesn’t take pictures or show movies...so can relate somewhat to a stodgy rejection of the digital age...seeing it as another expensive burden, another obstruction standing in the way of traditional human connections...even if it’s formed new kinds of connections as we converse effortlessly and instantly with people on the other side of the world...however many painful misunderstandings may ensue as we continue struggling to figure out the rules for a brave new radically smaller world...

....then, one could say the same of any technological innovation...including, certainly, the manual typewriters Luddite writers tend to be so proud of...as if the sages of old used them to write their sacred scriptures (note: they didn’t)...as well any form of mass communication...movable type, without a doubt...and, certainly, we can’t forget the invention of writing itself...I mean, just imagine: there was a time...for much of human beings’ tenure on earth, in fact...when a relatively close level of physical intimacy was required for any communication...to hear what another person thought, you would have to be close enough to hear that person’s voice...most likely looking into his or her face...and, chances are, you would rarely speak to anyone you hadn’t known for your or their whole life...all communication was close communication...

...then, if the invention of writing was alienating, it can’t have held a candle to the invention of words themselves...before which, I can only assume, communication must have been accomplished solely by facial expressions, and subtle—or not so subtle—gestures...and touching...no representing by phonemes or anything else...no abstraction at all...

Who needs action when you got words?
the Meat Puppets

...was writing last week...for myself...had a point, to begin with, but ended up kinda listing everything I’d been up to, or thinking about...without really exploring anything...then started getting self-reflective...about how I was just catalonging stuff...was about to fix that...make it cataloging...but decided I liked it better the way it was...listing stuff in seeming aimlessness as an expressing of longing for...what?...something more meaningful to write about? something to come up in the list that’ll catch fire and glow with transcendent meaning? or, maybe, something that couldn’t be written about at all...but that I wanted to express nonetheless...leaving me nothing but catalonging...

...while writing, was listening to the Blood on the Tracks album...in Tangled Up in Blue it sounds like Dylan sings I murdered something underneath my breath rather than I muttered...and if so, would that mean he had something meaningful to express that not only couldn’t be said aloud, but shouldn’t, under pain of death?...it’d have to be shouldn’t...you don’t murder something just because it couldn’t...