The reward for attention is always healing. It may begin as the healing of a particular pain – the lost lover, the sick child, the shattered dream. But what is healed, finally, is the pain that underlies all pain: the pain that we are all, as Rilke phrases it, unutterably alone. More than anything else, attention is the act of connection. I learned this the way I have learned most things – quite by accident. I love this passage from Julia Cameron, but it occurs to me that she unwittingly disproved Rilke: we are only provisionally or situationally alone. There are a hundred million ways to reach out of our solitude so that we need no longer be alone. Ok, most of the connections are fragile, or even fleeting, but still, they are our only and an effective answer to our aloneness...
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 13:26:34 +0000
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