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We are three adults living in a polyamorous triad family. The content here is intended for an adult audience. If you are not an adult, please leave now.

12/06/2011

Borrowing Words

I come here day after day, and I cannot find words.
I am broken.  Hopeless.  Without faith.  Believing, finally in nothing.
In one moment of weakness, inattention, fear, and foolishness, I destroyed everything I ever valued.
Some things cannot be fixed.

The silence inside my mind feels oppressive.
I've nothing at all to offer but the borrowed words of a poet...  swan



Fear of the Inexplicable

But fear of the inexplicable has not alone impoverished
the existence of the individual; the relationship between
one human being and another has also been cramped by it,
as though it had been lifted out of the riverbed of 
endless possibilities and set down in a fallow spot on the 
bank, to which nothing happens. For it is not inertia alone
that is responsible for human relationships repeating
themselves from case to case, indescribably monotonous and
unrenewed: it is shyness before any sort of new,unforeseeable
experience with which one does not think oneself able to cope.

But only someone who is ready for everything, who excludes 
nothing, not even the most enigmatical, will live the relation 
to another as something alive and will himself draw exhaustively
from his own existence. For if we think of this existence of
the individual as a larger or smaller room, it appears evident 
that most people learn to know only a corner of their room, a
place by the window, a strip of floor on which they walk up and 
down. Thus they have a certain security. And yet that dangerous
insecurity is so much more human which drives the prisoners in 
Poe's stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons
and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their abode. 

We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares are set about
us, and there is nothing which should intimidate or worry us.
We are set down in life as in the element to which we best 
correspond, and over and above this we have through thousands of 
years of accommodation become so like this life, that when we 
hold still we are, through a happy mimicry,scarcely to be
distinguished from all that surrounds us. We have no reason to
mistrust our world, for it is not against us. Has it terrors, 
they are our terrors; has it abysses, those abuses belong to us; 
are dangers at hand, we must try to love them. And if only we 
arrange our life according to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult, then that which now 
still seems to us the most alien will become what we most trust
and find most faithful. How should we be able to forget those
ancient myths about dragons that at the last moment turn into 
princesses; perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses
who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps 
everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless 
that wants help from us. 


Rainer Maria Rilke 

11 comments:

  1. Renee'8:30 PM

    Dear Swan,
    I am not you, nor in your home, nor even know you aside from the words you and those who know you have offered over the years on these pages. So my surmise may be without basis but I'll share any way :)

    You did not do this damage alone. You do not own all the credit so stop holding it so tightly. As well I don't believe it's destroyed. Damaged, debilitated, irreparably changed perhaps but not destroyed because what I think you value most is Tom and T and they still exist albeit each with their own wounds and pain. Maybe you will go on to rebuild in the newness or maybe you will find that you can't palate the new taste. Growth will happen one way or another. Just don't beat yourself up over and over when you weren't the only one who stepped into the ring.

    Wishes of light and love and laughter for all three of you.

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  2. ugh i really should check my "feed" more frequently....

    thinking of you more than ever..

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  3. Sending warm thoughts to the three of you. The sadness is overwhelming and so palpable.


    mouse

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  4. Anonymous8:50 PM

    I discovered your blog a few weeks ago,and read the whole thing (including Swan's Hheart). It read like a novel; I was completely compelled. But of course it's not a novel--it's your life. So I only know your story from your words. But as you have narrated your life over the last six years or so, it's very clear that there are 3 characters. And it's also clear who has the power. I don't think your story--as you have told it over a long time--supports the idea that you, and you alone, destroyed everything you ever valued. If you like Rile, read "The Archaic Torso of Appollo"--especially the last phrase.

    I know you don't like anonymous comments, but I really don't have any of the IDs listed in the comment box, and if I do, I don't understand how they work in this format. So I will sign my name below.

    Miranda

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  5. weirdgirl9:41 PM

    sending love to all.

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  6. Hugs and hope....abby

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  7. Nope.
    Not true.
    This is not something you did all by yourself.
    For one thing, you were responding to a situation.
    Responding.
    And I truly don't think you could have foreseen the results.

    Do you wish things had been different?
    Sure.
    But if so, spare some time to wish that the situation to which you had to respond had been different.

    We are human.
    We are not perfect.
    We are not omniscient.

    We don't have some sort of magic DVD that allows us to see possible outcomes to different scenarios so we can make perfect choices that will yield dependable results.

    I cannot see how it helps things get better either for guilt to be poured on your head or for you to tilt back your head and open your mouth and allow yourself to be waterboarded by it.

    You quote Rilke: "perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave." You can't be beautiful and brave if you are burdened by more than your appropriate share of guilt for where you all are now. Not only doesn't it help the relationship. It's tearing you to pieces.

    Now go take a nice long walk and free yourself to be the brave and beautiful and caring and perceptive creature that you are.

    o.g.

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  8. I feel so useless, being so far away. Sending rainbows your way....

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  9. Anonymous8:20 PM

    When I was in my twenties i was in a car accident. The car got stick in a rut on the side of the highway. I swerved while going too fast. The car turned over one and a half times, in front of a hugh truck. We came to a stop on the other side of the hughway, upside down. Amazingly no one was hurt, though the car was totaled. In a moment of panic, I made a wrong decision by swerving the car too fast. I still occasionally think of that moment and shiver. Had my mother and my husband been killed, i would have always lived my life with the guilt and responsibility of their deaths. But what is the difference? In either scenario, I made the same mistake. But the meaning of that action depends on the consequences.


    If I read your story right, the police harrassed Tom after the Walmart meeting. So yes, maybe you are responsible partlynfor that. But (again drawing on my memories of your story), Tom came home, gotmdrunk and became abusive enough that you and T went to a motel to protect yourselves. Sure there is a chain of circumstances from that event to the earlier event and probably to a myriad of events before that. But are you responsiblle for every single thing that produces the complicated entangled mess of most people's lives? Sometimes little moments of inattention do bring great and unexpected consequences. But usually little mistakes happen, are forgotten, or not even registered

    Forgive me, as a complete stranger having the presumption to lecture this way. But I am a reader of the story you have been telling so long and so eloquently

    Miranda

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  10. Anonymous11:26 PM

    Why don't some of you people post your sh*t in an email where she can answer, ignore or delete? You make all kinds of assumptions based on no info and then offer advice.

    Because no insight or piece of advice you now bring to the table has ever been said before.

    Good grief. Why don't you just say I'm sorry you are hurting without laying on your 2 cents?

    K

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  11. Oh Swan, I hope you aren't broken. I know it seems that way some days. I want to hug you and tell you everything will be alright. I hope it will. I really do.
    -sin

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