Imagine to Remember

I often feel that I am split by two desires. Pulled by warring forces. I stand at the point at which one path diverges from another and I am paralyzed by fear, or is it cowardice? Every choice is also a negation, every action a refutation. But I am suspicious of my own desires and I surveil them with the brutality of a tyrant. The latent potentiality of the opposite beats with its own heart, a parallel life force. A mirror facing a mirror. 

There is always my desire for the divine, or at least my wanting of a greater and more noble want. I aspire to be a mystic mountain seeking God with every breath, subsisting on little food, wearing coarse cotton like the first sufis so that I, in the stripping and denying unfetter myself from the shackles of flesh, to free myself of the world, to reach a sort of ecstasy of knowing, leaving the mind and body, and into at least what seems to me, to enter the pure etheric soul being.

And, yet, in the very next moment with just as much intensity I crave a different kind of freedom. I want comfort, pleasure, and beauty that is not all spiritual, but totally aesthetic. Why bore myself with thinking critically and reflectively? Only sensuous, unserious pleasure and joy will do. I want shiny new things, and I want to amass them with no thought of how they came to me. To covet, to be “free”, in the most immature, vapid way possible. To be unbound, if only a little, from the strict morality I have imposed on myself since girlhood, because I feared nothing more than to be bad, and became neurotically obsessed with being good. 

In his poem “On Freedom” Kahlil Gibran writes…

“Verily all things move within your being

in constant half embrace, the desired and

the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished,

the pursued and that which you would escape.

These things move within you as lights

and shadows in pairs that cling.

And when the shadow fades and is no

more, the light that lingers becomes a

shadow to another light.”

But this constant flux is dizzying. It is the incessant conversation between my selfs, the things that “move within my being”. Freedom, and its pursuit, binds us with its own chain “though its links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.” It is a false truth, an unjust law written by my own hand; to associate spirituality with an inhuman purity and to associate humanness with a dangerous indulgence. The truth is not in between, it is neither. Can there not be worship that is sensual, and work that is joyous? Meals consumed with all senses, and gratitude with every morsel. Beauty in the mundane, and sorrows that bear within them the seeds of new joys. Body and soul. Heaven and earth. Into what Gibran calls the “greater freedom”.