For the first time in several years, I am reading many books at once. Or at least, I’m dabbling in many while deeply reading few. Most are fiction, a few are activism-based, and then there is TSK.

Some days I read furiously, as much as possible, as though digging tunnels to make an escape. Others, I delicately sift and brush single sentences at a time, taking care not to lose hints of meaning, content to stay where I am.

Either way, I find that I’m longing for solitude and quiet arts, thus the knitting and memoir writing as well. One book I just re-read was Circe, a superb re-imagining of a nymph out of Greek mythology, recast as a witch drawn to humans, banished to an island as punishment. She finds banishment suits her far more than acceptance in the palaces ever could.

I guess I keep bringing this up, but the more I write about ‘my life’, the more simultaneously confusing and beautiful it seems. The consistent practice of questioning assumptions about the way things are, can make everything I write seem like a lie, every story I pin down, some genre of fiction–which is frightening, quaking, exposing of groundlessness indicative of reality. I’m not uncomfortable in this ghostiness, except when I feel trapped outside looking in.

“Don’t worry, there is nothing real about your confusion.” -Lojong

“You take nothing for granted.” – Something I once heard in meditation

Negative capability is a phrase first used by Romantic poet John Keats in 1817 to
explain the capacity of the greatest writers to pursue a vision of artistic beauty
even when it leads them into intellectual confusion and uncertainty,
as opposed to a preference for philosophical certainty over artistic beauty. The term
has been used by poets and philosophers to describe the ability to perceive and
recognize truths beyond the reach of consecutive reasoning. [Wikipedia]
(came across as a note-to-self recently)