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| Gustav Klimt - Beethoven Frieze: Longing for Happiness Finds Repose in Poetry. Right wall, detail. (1902) |
How do you choose to live your life? How do you choose to love?
After it is all over, and the jackal-headed god weighs your heart, he will not add in what your best friend told you to do. The scales will only report on how you lived, and how you loved.
Is your love some imagining of the way it once was? Or do you embrace love as it presents itself to you, here and now, on this path? Is it easier to simply re-write the moment and pretend it is all something less than what it is?
Do you argue with unconditional love, because its very freedom threatens the imaginary structure in which you have enshrined your self-image?
And what is your relationship with poignancy itself? Is it something that you stumble upon now and then, and relate to awkwardly, and only for as long as is required of you? And do you then rush off to immerse yourself in the agenda that you have drawn up, unwilling to accept that you do not have to choose between them? Or is poignancy a state of being that you have stepped inside of, and vow never to leave again, no matter what the price?
To feel, to truly feel, and revel in that realm of feeling, boldly, with laughter and tears, yes.
Are you willing to declare beauty when beauty arises before you, even if you know the true price of such a declaration? Are you willing to become an expression of the tenderness you feel, even if you know that very tenderness is an all consuming fire?
How do you choose to live your life? How do you choose to love? After it is all over, and the jackal-headed god weighs your heart, he will not add in what your best friend told you to do. The scales will only report on how you lived, and how you loved.
To feel, to truly feel, and revel in that realm of feeling, boldly, with laughter and tears, yes.
-- Richard Power
Power's eighth book, Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality in an Era of Global Peril , is available now in soft cover and Kindle versions, from Amazon and elsewhere.
