Breathing without thinking..
Dec. 8th, 2005 08:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatTonight, my hands are cold. The cold air wraps itself around my fingers chilling my knuckles, making it difficult to type, I keep rubbing them. My legs and arms and feet feel cozy, wrapped in a blanket, but exposed, my fingers and nose ache for mittens or a warm heater. Yet I write anyways. The cold outside almost makes me forget to breathe, the breath frozen the moment it leaves my throat.
[Yes, the heat in my building is fluctuating again, warm when I got home, getting cooler now, while last night it was more regulated.]
Just finished The Samuari's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama, which I seriously doubt anyone reading this journal has read, although I could be wrong about that. Wouldn't be the first time. I'm wrong about a lot of things, more things than I'm right about, I suspect. I admit that. "The Samuari's Garden" is a small book. A guiet one. Without much fanfair. The words seem simple, effortless, yet precise. They aren't long sentences struggling to climb mountaintops of verbage like Dorothy Dunnet writes or a flood of precisely chosen words streaming across the page like Joyce. Nor the simultaneously witty and detached perfected prose of Austen. Breathing without thinking comes to mind when I read Tsukiyama's words. Yes, she writes like one who breaths without thinking. I sometimes think, no strike that, I do "think" too much. They say that when you learn how to walk - you have to allow your body to move without the mind telling it to. Same goes with breathing - when you think about it too much, you throw things out of wack. I think writing is like this too. Sometimes my writing resembles words flooding unbidden across the page, faster than my fingers can form them, yet at the same time miraculously making sense and others, they require much work, much articulation, to the point that I feel as if I am pulling them out of my brain by their roots, each one more painful than the last. No writing experience is the same, no sentence. I cannot reproduce them. Any more than I can go back in time and return to the person who created them at that moment. I am not the person I was yesterday. Yet, I hold her memories, ever so slightly alterred with time.
Towards the end of Ms. Tsukiyama's novel there's a lovely passage that I'd like to share, which I do not believe gives anything away, but touched me deeply tonight - perhaps because tonight I was in one of those moods. The type of mood that you can't quite find a word for, it lingers in the air like an indrawn breath, caught. Tense is not quite the word. So much as frozen. Caught. Disconnect. Uncertain. No, none quite work. So instead I share a passage from a book that touched my heart. As an aside, it's a rare thing for a passage in a book to touch my heart and no I don't mean in the way a Hallmark card would or a fantastic and memorable read. But something that just, changes you ever so slightly once you've read it, so that the person you are now is not quite the same person you were before you read the book. I think, at least for me, or the proverbial I, that books change people. Anything we interact with does. It changes us. How it changes us, cannot be determined until after the fact, which makes choosing so difficult. But I digress and it is growing late and I don't know about you, but have a long rigorous day ahead of me, which I won't bore you with the details of.
I share this passage with a bit of trepidation, aware that you will most likely not reacte to it the same way I did. (Does anyone?) But here it is, whatever you may think of it, and perhaps it reads better within the context of the story, which bears a little consideration.
"We aren't so different, humans beings and plants. We are all a part of one nature and from each other we learn how to live. "
"Even as one person destroys another?"
Matsu slowly got up from the ground. He stood back and looked approvingly at the black pine. "I won't say we human beings still don't have much to learn. Sometimes we love and hate without thought. We expect too much from one another, and often we are wrong. Take that flower," he said, pointing to the crepe myrtle. "It has a short life span, but you know just what to expect of it. The leaves are turning yellow-orange, so you know within a week they'll fall. Fortunately - or unfortunately- we human beings have much longer lives. And that makes for many more complications. But in the end, Stephen-san, you can only look back, hoping everything that happens in your life is for a purpose. Whether you see [this person] or not anymore won't take away from your having known [them]. If [they] are important, [they] will stay with you."
(I modified three minor pronouns to remove any possible spoilers.) After I read this passage the first thing that popped into my head was, how does one learn how to breath without thinking? Because that was what it sort of says, learning how to just be. To be quiet, still. Never was very good at stillness. Too busy inside. Constantly jumping. How to relax, not be so intense. How not to yearn for too much. To accept. And to love as if you were merely taking one breath and then exhaling, not gulping air frantically like a drowning man. And not fight constantly, breathless, the encroachment of time and other things limitless things, lurking in the shadows. Which would most likely include opinions and thoughts and choices not my own. So little I control yet so much, the contradictions overwhelm. I feel at times as if I'm fighting some forcefield that surrounds me. Fighting to be something or get on some path that remains out of reach. To hold on to breaths that have escaped. All the while trying to just breath without thinking. (When I do my art, am intellectually focused on something, doing pottery, writing a story, this occurs..)
Matsu goes on to tell us shortly after the passage written above, that there will be others, many others...to love. I worry sometimes if that is true. I've dated few and far between. The last serious one was ages ago. Yet, by the same token, I know love comes in different shapes and sizes and moods. It's like the flowers. It is never the same. Which makes sense actually, for how can it be, neither am I. When I focus on the breaths I take, I can't breathe, yet when I don't I barely notice how each one is different than the last. There's something to be said, I think, for the unconsciousness of living, of breathing. Not being too self-aware. That doesn't really convey how I felt while reading this passage, nor the book for that matter - which opened my eyes on a few things and switched my pov on others as a book, written poorly or well, will do, but it touches on a piece of it.
The Samauri's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is published by St. Martin's Griffin. 1994. Paperback sells for 12.75 (although you could probably find a cheaper copy - I borrowed mine from my mother's bookshelf). Her first novel was Women of the Silk. The author was born to a Japanese father and a Chinese mother , she lives in California. If you are in the mood for a gentle story about kindness with gardening as a metaphor, I heartily recommend.
[Yes, the heat in my building is fluctuating again, warm when I got home, getting cooler now, while last night it was more regulated.]
Just finished The Samuari's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama, which I seriously doubt anyone reading this journal has read, although I could be wrong about that. Wouldn't be the first time. I'm wrong about a lot of things, more things than I'm right about, I suspect. I admit that. "The Samuari's Garden" is a small book. A guiet one. Without much fanfair. The words seem simple, effortless, yet precise. They aren't long sentences struggling to climb mountaintops of verbage like Dorothy Dunnet writes or a flood of precisely chosen words streaming across the page like Joyce. Nor the simultaneously witty and detached perfected prose of Austen. Breathing without thinking comes to mind when I read Tsukiyama's words. Yes, she writes like one who breaths without thinking. I sometimes think, no strike that, I do "think" too much. They say that when you learn how to walk - you have to allow your body to move without the mind telling it to. Same goes with breathing - when you think about it too much, you throw things out of wack. I think writing is like this too. Sometimes my writing resembles words flooding unbidden across the page, faster than my fingers can form them, yet at the same time miraculously making sense and others, they require much work, much articulation, to the point that I feel as if I am pulling them out of my brain by their roots, each one more painful than the last. No writing experience is the same, no sentence. I cannot reproduce them. Any more than I can go back in time and return to the person who created them at that moment. I am not the person I was yesterday. Yet, I hold her memories, ever so slightly alterred with time.
Towards the end of Ms. Tsukiyama's novel there's a lovely passage that I'd like to share, which I do not believe gives anything away, but touched me deeply tonight - perhaps because tonight I was in one of those moods. The type of mood that you can't quite find a word for, it lingers in the air like an indrawn breath, caught. Tense is not quite the word. So much as frozen. Caught. Disconnect. Uncertain. No, none quite work. So instead I share a passage from a book that touched my heart. As an aside, it's a rare thing for a passage in a book to touch my heart and no I don't mean in the way a Hallmark card would or a fantastic and memorable read. But something that just, changes you ever so slightly once you've read it, so that the person you are now is not quite the same person you were before you read the book. I think, at least for me, or the proverbial I, that books change people. Anything we interact with does. It changes us. How it changes us, cannot be determined until after the fact, which makes choosing so difficult. But I digress and it is growing late and I don't know about you, but have a long rigorous day ahead of me, which I won't bore you with the details of.
I share this passage with a bit of trepidation, aware that you will most likely not reacte to it the same way I did. (Does anyone?) But here it is, whatever you may think of it, and perhaps it reads better within the context of the story, which bears a little consideration.
"We aren't so different, humans beings and plants. We are all a part of one nature and from each other we learn how to live. "
"Even as one person destroys another?"
Matsu slowly got up from the ground. He stood back and looked approvingly at the black pine. "I won't say we human beings still don't have much to learn. Sometimes we love and hate without thought. We expect too much from one another, and often we are wrong. Take that flower," he said, pointing to the crepe myrtle. "It has a short life span, but you know just what to expect of it. The leaves are turning yellow-orange, so you know within a week they'll fall. Fortunately - or unfortunately- we human beings have much longer lives. And that makes for many more complications. But in the end, Stephen-san, you can only look back, hoping everything that happens in your life is for a purpose. Whether you see [this person] or not anymore won't take away from your having known [them]. If [they] are important, [they] will stay with you."
(I modified three minor pronouns to remove any possible spoilers.) After I read this passage the first thing that popped into my head was, how does one learn how to breath without thinking? Because that was what it sort of says, learning how to just be. To be quiet, still. Never was very good at stillness. Too busy inside. Constantly jumping. How to relax, not be so intense. How not to yearn for too much. To accept. And to love as if you were merely taking one breath and then exhaling, not gulping air frantically like a drowning man. And not fight constantly, breathless, the encroachment of time and other things limitless things, lurking in the shadows. Which would most likely include opinions and thoughts and choices not my own. So little I control yet so much, the contradictions overwhelm. I feel at times as if I'm fighting some forcefield that surrounds me. Fighting to be something or get on some path that remains out of reach. To hold on to breaths that have escaped. All the while trying to just breath without thinking. (When I do my art, am intellectually focused on something, doing pottery, writing a story, this occurs..)
Matsu goes on to tell us shortly after the passage written above, that there will be others, many others...to love. I worry sometimes if that is true. I've dated few and far between. The last serious one was ages ago. Yet, by the same token, I know love comes in different shapes and sizes and moods. It's like the flowers. It is never the same. Which makes sense actually, for how can it be, neither am I. When I focus on the breaths I take, I can't breathe, yet when I don't I barely notice how each one is different than the last. There's something to be said, I think, for the unconsciousness of living, of breathing. Not being too self-aware. That doesn't really convey how I felt while reading this passage, nor the book for that matter - which opened my eyes on a few things and switched my pov on others as a book, written poorly or well, will do, but it touches on a piece of it.
The Samauri's Garden by Gail Tsukiyama is published by St. Martin's Griffin. 1994. Paperback sells for 12.75 (although you could probably find a cheaper copy - I borrowed mine from my mother's bookshelf). Her first novel was Women of the Silk. The author was born to a Japanese father and a Chinese mother , she lives in California. If you are in the mood for a gentle story about kindness with gardening as a metaphor, I heartily recommend.