Ocean waves blue,
Sky is too,
Written at Petiscos do ‘I forget’,
23rd October 2024,
Sesimbra, Portugal
Dear Love,
Today I was feeling particularly lonely.
I went for a walk as I do. then I took a swim in the ocean. Incredible isn’t it. Bu yet, that feeling that holds on, that kind of loneliness for life that is nearly impossible to satiate wrapped around me
It is so unpleasant.
But there it is sinking into me. Paradoxically, I feel so light today almost too light that I keep wanting to be grounded or anchored, tied to something or someone. This lightness has been almost too much to bare as well. There is a purification taking place.
Sometimes I walk in circles, don’t know where I want to go, don’t know where I want to sit, so I meander, I turn like an animal searching for a spot to lie down.
Now I know if I just distract myself long enough this feeling would go away as it does, but it didn’t want to go away and I didn’t want it to leave until it was through with me. So there I was walking, feeling the loneliness of my moment, passing people in the street, the breeze passing by me, and as I walked by the Indian restaurant a fly buzzed my face. I continued on toward one of my favorite writing spots.
There was a dog sitting outside tethered to a woman, a very kind woman. I said hello then entered the petiscos,, there was great music playing, always 80’s, I think the owner is a drummer. Rosanna on the audio system, war on the television, contradictions everywhere.
I ordered a coffee then headed outside.
A fly landed on my face as I sat down at the table.
I laughed as I accepted this little gesture of life touching me, a miniature hug and some gift left on my nose. One of my Buddhist teachers spoke of her affection for the little creatures that visit her during her solo retreats, her affection increasing as her time in retreat increases. We get company everywhere.
It’s a gesture of kindness how a little thing like that can wake you up. So with gratitude, I watched the feelings and my own aversion to those feelings of loneliness that can’t be satiated, that just are. I think it carries death with it, whatever death is.
Meanwhile on the street which you can see in the photo, a woman walks her mother home, two older women, one much older barely moving but moving well enough and her daughter 70 or so years, looking good.
There are many older women in my view today, a few with their heads bobbing in and out of their windows, three right in front of me hanging their laundry.
Loneliness…
I once had a brief friendship with a woman, who was so lonely that when things were not going the way she wanted between us, that in her last message to me, she wished me to feel such loneliness that my face melted. I wish I kept that message. The last sentence said, ‘but I still appreciate you’. That’s a funny kind of love.
God how I understood her, felt her, even wished to console her as a friend but she didn’t want a friend.
It is curious, that because I am me, most people I know think I haven’t experienced the kind of loneliness that steals years of life from you. But I have. I suppose it is one of the reasons why I wasn’t disturbed by her wish for me to experience the despair of loneliness, instead I empathized with her, perhaps she has yet to come to know that what she was feeling never truly leaves, we are all consumed by the ‘eternal loneliness’.
Perhaps that is also the key to liberation in life, to recognize what is and isn’t and to still play the game in spite of the knowing.
Happiness, loneliness, joy and despair, similar lovers, tangled affairs…
If loneliness exists then its opposite must exist too. Whatever that may be…
Curiously, I can’t think of an antonym for loneliness; none of the words that come to mind are truly not loneliness.
Moving through space and time…
Maybe that is one of the gifts of getting older, you remember sooner than later that your feelings will pass, that none of them are real, that you aren’t your feelings. That your desire not to feel what you feel causes more suffering than simply being with the feelings or allowing them to dissipate as they do. Well, I understood that ages ago, before I was ‘getting older’, so that is a bit of a lie. Consolation, perhaps…
Many of these feelings, if understood, are signs of purification, they are positive movements of understanding, of clarifying the true nature of the mind. It’s one of the gifts of your agitations. That I have come to realize with age.
Unfortunately most people can’t take the facing so they turn toward distractions and that doesn’t assist in the realization, which is understandable as well. It’s a long process. Circular suffering is circular until you see it and then use it for what it can be used for. I like circles.
Laughing while crying!
All so magnificently human…
I want to share with you this point one more time, your attitude toward your suffering can transform the suffering. Maybe that is why people often misinterpret my suffering as being non-existent, when in fact, I am simply interpreting it differently than most.
For me, it is a sign of progress. This is true alchemy.
While I am sitting here writing these words to you, a wonderfully wrinkled woman walked out of her door, stepping past the floating laundry that hangs from her window. And as we smiled at each other I said, “O dia está lindo, é maravilhoso. The day is beautiful; it is marvelous.” She smiled at me and pointed her finger waving it like a magic wand and said, “Sim, é verdade, e amanhã vai ser ainda melhor. Yes it is true, and tomorrow is going to be even better”.
Magic, everywhere…
Emeric Damian
www.EmericDamian.com/love-romp
p.s. I was thinking about how wonderful life is, how beautiful it is and then a stranger I said hello to as I entered the cafe came and joined me.
He invited himself to sit at my table and I accepted. He asked where I was from. I said Los Angeles. Everyone gets excited when I use that answer, even though I was actually born in Santa Monica, and only there for the first year of life. We spoke English – Portuguese. He told me of his familial challenges. He said he trusted my eyes. He told me how he wished his sister in-law an unbecoming ending. I didn’t trust his eyes but I trusted my understanding of his words. Even if I wanted to be alone, the fly, the man, the lady…
Later that evening, while I was walking, a character who often sits on the beach wall at night, whom I say hello to, said to me as I passed, “Só sozinho?”. I laughed as I said, “sempre”.
Só sozinho, “Always alone”…
Sempre, “Always”…
Oh how the universe speaks to you. “Why did he say such a thing at this particular moment in time, on this evening, of this kind of day?”
You are never alone even when you are; it is somehow of you as you are of it, life.
And as for today, the tomorrow the woman spoke of, it too is an incredible day, even more beautiful than the other though both equally beautiful as the last.
Stay sexy, beautiful, as beautiful as you are as you are all of it too, life breathing itself into and for you.
