Listening to the radio last night I chanced upon the discovery of one of those not-so-well-known legends, a haunting folk singer called Kath Bloom, whose exquisite poetic folk melancholy reminds me of Joni Mitchell (who is so close to my heart).

Synchronicstically, as I was looking her up it turned out that one of her songs was featured in Before Sunrise. A really beautiful little movie by director Richard LInklater with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delphy.  In it, two young travellers meet by chance on a train and spend twelve hours together exploring a city and each other, and in so doing end up connecting with brief intensity in love.

Interestingly for me, Hawke and Delphy are of my generation so the follow up movie, Before Sunset which picks up their story again some eight years later, temporally followed my own growing beyond young adulthood and so it has in some way, seemed to follow the contours of some of my own questions about love and life. 

The two movies question their chance meetings : what of our missed opportunities? the paths we don't follow?, what of randomness? ...synchroncity?, the magic of heart connections, do we have a soul mate?, what of the way love's presence and loss cuts into us?, what of our regrets and dissatisfactions with compromise?

... and Kath Bloom's music fits these questions most exactly...

"there's a wind that comes in from the north and it says that loving takes its course.... come here.... "

from When the Candle is Blown Out: On The Death of Katagiri Roshi, by Natalie Goldberg
........


“Roshi, now that I am divorced, it is very lonely.”

“Tell me. What do you do when you are alone in the house?”

I’d never thought of that. I became interested. “Well, I water the plants,” I faltered, then continued, “I wash a few dishes, call a friend.” The momentum built. “I sit on the couch for hours and stare at the bare branches out the window. I play over and over Paul Simon’s new album about New Mexico—I miss it there.”

His attention encouraged me. “Lately, I’ve been sitting at my dining-room table and painting little pictures.” I looked at him. Suddenly my solitary life had a texture.

“Is there anything wrong with loneliness?” he asked in a low voice.

I shook my head. All at once I saw it was a natural condition of life, like sadness, grief, even joy. When I was sitting with him, it didn’t feel ominous or unbearable.

“Anyone who wants to go to the source is lonely. There are many people at Zen Center. Those who are practicing deeply are only with themselves.”

“Are you lonely?” I entreated.

“Yes,” he nodded. “But I don’t let it toss me away. It’s just loneliness.”

“Do you ever get over it?”

“I take an ice-cold shower every morning. I never get used to it. It shocks me each time, but I’ve learned to stand up in it.” He pointed at me. “Can you stand up in loneliness?”

He continued, “Being alone is the terminal abode. You can’t go any deeper in your practice if you run from it.”

He spoke to me evenly, honestly. My hunger was satiated—the ignored little girl still inside me and the adult seeker—both were nourished.

The bohemian french writer Anais Nin reads as an astounding creature : intelligent,  adventurous, sensual. I feel affinity with her relationship to the aesthetic, to creativity, to having an artistic practice, to her self work (she was in psychoanalysis for a long time),  and with the spirited way she wrestled with her yearning for a grand, 'ideal' love.



Once of the things that really stayed with me from reading her diaries years ago, was the passage where she speaks of preparing her house: both of physically creating a beautiful space that was an extension of her interior, and metaphorically of preparing, of readying her self for this great love:

"Most of my life has been spent in enriching as well as I could the long, long waiting for the great events which fill me now so deeply that I am overwhelmed. Now I understand the terrific restlessness, the tragic sense of failure, the deep discontent.  I was waiting. This is the hour of expansion fo true living. All the rest was a preparation. Thirty years of anguished watchfulness. And how these are the days I lived for. And to be aware of this, so fully aware, that is what is almost humanly unbearable.   Himan beings cannot bear the knowledge of the future.  To me, the knowledge of the present is just as dazzling.  To be so actuely rich and to know it."

And this too passed.

While I am not yet forty, with those gates of passage looming in my years, I also  feel much affinity with this, written some years later :

"At forty I enter a new maturity, stripped of my mirages, dreams and miracles, of my delusions and illusions and my heavy romantic sorrows. What awaits me is the expression of this strength, in action. I am about to lay down my magician’s wand, my healer’s paraphernalia…and to confront the act, in writing as well as in living."

I don't know about laying down the magician's wand... but I too feel that need to confront my movement into a new stage; or at least, to be standing wakefully at the precipice, observing the shifting of paths. To confront where I have come from. To confront where I have gone adrift, where my plans, best laid and otherwise, have come undone. And once again to return, and more deeply and thoroughly this time, confront where and who I am; perhaps who I will be.

"... peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while.  The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the foresaken land, and hope returned to him.  For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for every beyond its reach"

"Sati had the feeling that this was the first time her body had really existed.  It wasn't as if SIva was penetrating her, but as if he opened himself up to her like a huge cavity, welcoming her into himself. The contact with the surface of his body absorbed her into it.. She pressed on toward the center of him, as though toward the glow of a fire in the depths of a cave.  She was lost, but felt she was about to find herself. Or rather: She felt that what was happening was a return" (p79)

Ka, Roberto Calasso