(Backfill) Know Thyself
"To learn — especially to learn something which you have been told is a great spell — will forever change you. To change is to experience pain. Those who are at ease with feeling their own pain will feel comfortable giving pain. They must not know such secrets."
-Blacksun, "The Spell of Making"
I ran across those words yesterday while reading one of my all-time favourite books and looking for help or inspiration in writing my coven's Mabon (Autumn equinox) ritual. I was on the ferry to the Sunshine Coast, re-browsing through the prologue — a superbly atmospheric piece of prose — when these words of the High Priestess emerged for the first time in my memory. It felt topical, timely, fortuitous, and all that stuff that goes together to make up a revelatory, pseudo-spiritual experience. "I used to be just like that," I thought to myself after I read the passage, "And I know far too many people who are like that now."
Now comes the part where I hesitate to go on. Instead, I read over the paragraph, count the words, fix the punctuation. The wind rustles the pages in my book, and I make a little duct-tape contraption to hold them in place. Clever. Clever diversions from my dilemma: how to continue? How do you reach people whose problem is that they can't be reached? Composition collapses. I'm becoming p(r)etty and postmodern, not important and real.
The wind defies me again, as a warm seabreeze washes over my pages. A bee flies past and I follow its path out over the rocky beach. I look out at the ocean — not ten feet away — and as I think to myself, "Tim, you're writing a fucking blog entry on the beach..." I get my answer:
You don't. Some people can't be helped, or won't be helped by others. They'll bounce between desperation, depression, euphoria, and ambivalence. They'll fill their life with a thousand things to justify it, or hide in a cave. Or they'll simply put on an empty smile and say nothing to anyone. It doesn't make them bad people, nor any less deserving of love, but instead makes them tragedies, casualties of their own human conditions — some with pain so deep that you can't help but be almost consumed by it.
It's up to them to decide when to feel true contentment and real happiness. When they can peer inwards as easily and unabashedly as they do out. When they can find their own perfect place in their own imperfect world.
I haven't found mine yet. But I'm going to.
Written On: The Beach - Gibsons, BC
Currently Listening To: The Pacific Ocean