waking…

Those of you who have been following my blog might have noticed that I haven’t been posting much lately… been rather quite lately, and not up to much words… even (dare I say!) not much up to painting, but instead more drawn to meditation and reflection and reading…

So it may not be a coincident that this book feel into my hands: “Waking, a memoir of trauma and transcendence” by Matthew Sanford. And even though I have no idea how it feels like to live in a paralyzed body, the way he describes the feeling of silence as three quarters of his body became inaccessible to him, struck me as familiar. Are we really connected with our bodies and feelings, with our surroundings, with every fiber our being rooted in this existence we have entered on earth?

Dying and letting go are part of every fiber of our bodies and cells, every minute, second, feelings and thoughts come and go. The grief he encountered when he realized the loss of part of his body, and the years that he ignored the pain, seemed similar to the way we treat our own impending death and loss and pain that we encounter in this life on earth. Add to that the impending dissolution of the world around us, terror, suffering, sorrow, war, environmental disasters…

What is it that makes us still struggle on, that makes us live despite the pain and the sorrow of this existence on earth? The joys, the successes? Or the feeling of a greater good, connectedness, or sense of something more than all those parts added up? Some sort of “healing stories” as he calls it in his book?

“There is a difference between seeking and looking for answers. I am not looking for answers. Rather I seek to appriciate and believe in my experience.” Matthew Stanford.