Sunday one of my determinedly cheerful friends lit a candle celebrating community, celebrating his claim that if you ask for help then help will be given. What a fine notion. In the non-dualistic reality where I live, though, help directly given only sometimes meets a need. Asking for and receiving from another the help one needs seems a marvelous but insufficient method of creating and sustaining one's life.
"Live in the layers, / not on the litter," Stanley Kunitz writes, deep into his poem "The Layers." Reach through surface and humus to far-down bedrock; extend fingertips into the clouds and beyond. Occasionally a friend from the lives-in-another-skin community can and will meet an expressed need. More frequently our needs are met in the internal community through which we brush along with everyone else, most needs (identified or not) met in mysterious, indirect paths of intention and struggle, body chemistry, life habits that carry us, changes big and subtle over which we have small yet insistent control.
"What do you need to feel better?" asks one line of the doctor's routine-visit questionnaire. That question confounds me. I wonder how he would answer that question. Do you have an answer, a true answer?
This morning snow covers the world within my horizons and sleet is presently falling. The sun rose behind thick clouds, its light so diffuse the world seems monochrome. Close up I distinguish dark green pines, beige stalks of under growth in the woods, variegated browns and winter moss colors on tree trunks. The red barn still shows red, and the red bird. How much our views depend on our place in the picture and the kind of light.
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