Love Is An Art

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"Love is an art you learn degree by degree." I Want a Long Time Daddy – Bea Foote

I'm not quite sure what to do with this week's prompt. I haven't been able to come up with a single unified idea to write about. Instead, I keep coming back to my training in literary analysis. I've deliberately not looked up the entire poem. (BTW, Road Trip Girl selected this week's prompt.) This single line reminds of what I consider to be one of the beautiful things about English (and in truth, likely any language). There's great richness to the language and word choice with multiple and sometimes diverse meanings. And as a person attracted to postmodern theory, I like that richness and multiplicity and like to keep those many possible meanings in play all of the time.

So, what is this love that we learn? Do we learn it bit-by-bit ("degree by degree"), or do we learn it by earning degrees in love ("degree by degree")? And what would it mean to earn a degree in love? Would a degree be an instance of the experience of love? Would multiple degrees in love imply multiple love relationships, or multiple ways of loving? What does it even mean to "learn" love when love is, or at least seems to be, something one feels and experiences?

These are the questions that this one isolated line raises in my mind. And the fact that there are no definite answers to any of these questions makes the line all that more appealing. Perhaps it's time to look at the rest of the poem and put the line in context.

On a side note, the author of this poem, Bea Foote, seems awfully close to Big Foot. Hmmm, Road Trip Girl (AKA Squatch), what's going on here?


Please check the blogs listed on the right for companion pieces to this week's prompt.

Next week's prompt: Burning the candle at both ends.

September

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Your position on the calendar
Marks the beginning of the end of the year,
The beginning of its perpetual death.
And yet, you too cycle through living and dying
To be reborn for another thirty days,
Marking death with your own birth.

The days shorten and the nights lengthen
We turn from summer reads at the beach
To the more intellectual matters of the academy.
The pace quickens in a rush towards death.
That short thirty days speeds past matching our pace,
Closing too abruptly with the first cold winds of winter.


Please check the blogs listed on the right for companion pieces to this week's prompt.


Next week's prompt: "Love is an art you learn degree by degree." I Want a Long Time Daddy – Bea Foote

The Hour of Departure

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You left. You left in a moment. Not an hour, not a minute. It was a moment. A single, imperceptible moment. I held you and you were there, and then suddenly you had departed. That "hard cold hour" was not one of departing. It was not a process stretched out over sixty minutes. It was the empty space left by one who has already departed. And it's been much more than an hour.

Long ago, you had departed once before. It was a departure that I chose, and because of that, it was much easier to accept. But then you returned and I felt redeemed. My choice was a regrettable choice, but I believed then, or wanted to believe then, that it was the right choice. When you returned, I felt I was given a second chance. And I hoped, wished that your departing would never come forth again. Knowing all the time, that departure is fastened "to all timetables."

Departure is as much a part of arrival as history is a part of the future. We cannot have one without the other. It is the natural course of things. It is the right course of things. My welcoming of you always already carried within it my farewell. Then, the coming goodbye seemed so far away that I didn't need to think about it. Now it seems it came too fast.



Please check the blogs listed on the right for companion pieces to this week's prompt.

Next week's prompt: September

In Mourning

Joy and pain are very natural parts of life. They are what makes us human. And they are perhaps the extremes of human emotion.

Right now I am on the pain side of the spectrum. Please see the memorial to my beloved Zimba over at Crash Course.

Movement

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To move means to change. There is no stasis or stagnation in movement. It’s a moving forward and a moving beyond where one is at any given moment in time. Movement is a positive thing. It’s growth. It’s new thoughts and new things to see and do. And yet, movement can also bring pain. Change can be difficult emotionally. I often get anxious about change, fearing the unknown. But it’s also important. I fear even more becoming rigid. Without movement, the barriers get established and limits on one’s life are raised. And that is certainly something I don’t want.

All that being said, sometimes there is too much movement. Running helter skelter, here and there. Lives of stress, on the run, go go go. Such movement is not positive. On the contrary, it’s destructive, and meaningless. It’s counterproductive, setting one back rather than moving one forward into new being.

Movement in my life, unfortunately, tends to be more frequently of the latter type. One of my deepest hopes is that I’m able to distinquish the two, control the latter, and promote the former. I don’t think I’m very successful, at least not at the current moment.

It’s times like these when movement needs to slow or stop. One needs to be still both physically and mentally—slow oneself so that the world one occupies slows in response. The beauty of stopping movement in this way, at these times, is that the movement doesn’t really stop. The clarity and peace found in stepping off the train of chaotic movement allows one re-establish a productive flow of movement that benefits life.

Keep moving. Always. And seek the courage to neither be afraid of movement nor unwilling to free yourself from senseless motion.



Please check the blogs listed on the right for companion pieces to this week's prompt. Road Trip Girl is road tripping back to the blogosphere and should be posting again soon.

Next week’s prompt:
It is the hour of departure, the hard cold hour
which the night fastens to all the timetables.
Pablo Neruda, "A Song of Despair"