Anais Nin

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.