Chicago feels a bit like healing:
a weekend with Wei Wei & his lovely friends (some thoughts)
It starts with chasing a feeling that is ALIVE even when I don’t quite see it, and loving this little life. For twenty-one years, I’ve centered my existence by clutching another soul tightly. Now, I just want to embrace this phase of possibilities and change and love their differences.
I want to be open: to freely exit and enter this self –– out with the air disappearing at the pier and in with mulled wine to warm the restless heart. I’m staring out of the apartment window on East Lake St. and into the eyes of the world that always watch but rarely speak. I return to a blank state of being, the liminal space between the silence of the mind and the silence of the tongue, where thoughts ruminate.
Who am I?
“Tell me who you walk with, and I will tell you who you are.”
To visit an old friend I love is to hold a mirror, so clear, in my hands and suddenly notice all the spots I’ve forgotten to love amidst all this change. Some atoms always bind. How lucky am I to be understood! And how liberating it is to think that MOST THINGS DO NOT MATTER!! We could all muffle the performative selves, then? Oh, to tightrope the brittle divide between needs and desires, expectations from myself and others. Nobody will give up on me other than my grumpy delusions.
欲将心事付瑶琴。知音少，弦断有谁听？–– 岳飞 《小重山》
Tranlation: I would confide to my lute what I have in view / but connoisseurs are few. / Who would be listening / though I break my lute string? –– Yue Fei ‘Manifold Hills’ (circa 1142)
To visit an old friend I’ve loved for a long time reminds me of all the things that can outlive time. A different kind of life feels precarious and strange, yet in such a barren place, love never stops growing. Even better, I’m loving the new friends of my best friend. At last, the law of attraction applies.
I love a room of people talking about being transient and vagrant, yet do not mind the escapism in it all. We would host our funerals before our deaths and have a spree with drinks and dancing. It’s funny how fatalists and determinists could sit around the same table yet operate on completely different causes & effects. Leave the hard questions to the neurons. We really won’t understand much in this lifetime.
Currently loving:
Mulled wine (Helen’s recipe)
On Love by Alain de Botton
Album Tango 4 by Charly García & Pedro Aznar
Warmly,
Erica