I’ve been reading theoasisofmysoul, catching up with the last month of Ara’s postings, and there are some profound topics he opens. This man has been wandering on a BMW motorcycle for a decade since his son passed away. We share a deep wounding, a love for BMW airheads, and a life in the west. I look at his bike and sidecar, and can feel the part of me that would drop everything I do and everything I’m attached to, and journey as he does.
Spirit is his dog, who wears a helmet that says “Bite Me”. Ara wrote recently:
… I realize, still baffled, that I was wrong. I do have fear. I have the fear of losing Spirit which I know will happen some day. It is reality. I also have the worse fear of them all which is to Love. The real Love towards a person, meaning a deep relationship, a Lifetime one. I do Love my Friends, Mother Nature, good food, riding, photography, writing and more, but that true Love scares me, puts fear in me, the fear of, if it ever happened, losing again a true Love. It is not like I meet a possible companion everyday on this path of ours, but the anticipation of the possibility of losing a true Love has instated a fear in me. So much for living in the now.
He sees this great truth also: fear is ‘not present’, it’s all about the past and future. But we’ve responded differently to our loss, as I am so delightfully feeling love and being loved now, three years after loss.
I originally wrote a long thing, about what is the same and what is different between Ara and I. Then a friend happened to share this poem with me today. This says it all, much better than I can.
You left me and went on your way.
I thought I should mourn for you
and set your solitary image in my heart
wrought in a golden song.
But ah, my evil fortune, time is short.
Youth wanes year after year; the spring days are fugitive;
the frail flowers die for nothing,
and the wise man warns me that life is but a dew-drop on the lotus leaf.
Should I neglect all this to gaze
after one who has turned her back on me?
That would be rude and foolish, for time is short.
Then, come, my rainy nights with pattering feet;
smile, my golden autumn; come, careless April,
scattering your kisses abroad.
You come, and you, and you also!
My loves, you know we are mortals.
Is it wise to break one’s heart
for the one who takes her heart away?
For time is short.
It is sweet to sit in a corner to muse
and write in rhymes that you are all my world.
It is heroic to hug one’s sorrow
and determine not to be consoled.
But a fresh face peeps across my door
and raises its eyes to my eyes.
I cannot but wipe away my tears
and change the tune of my song.
For time is short.
-Rabindranath Tagore
Fresh face peeps across my door. I cannot but wipe away my tears and change the tune of my song, Jen. Je t’aime.