Since I’m out of town a few days I dug up these little thoughts to post. This is a journal entry from 15 years ago. Fragments for comment.
The experience of beauty shared is a sculpture carved out of the breath we all share. Meaning is created from trust between people, not be each, alone.
I like your metaphor ” The experience of beauty shared is a sculpture carved out of the breath we all share.”
You have a lovely way of conveying the intensity of shared human interaction. One often builds or creates a sculpture alone, a sculpture devoid of human characteristics or life until the essence of its form is experienced. Then the sculpture comes to life. If the sculpture merely exists, it has no life, no breath…
Communication/meaning of life and bonding cannot be rock solid (to pardon a type of sculpture pun) if there was not trust between people. Alone is lonely. Alone can be a retreat due to being scared of reaching out, scared of trusting that others will accept our true selves.
In this excerpt there seems to be unsaid questions, a desire to reach out but something is holding you back, a quest to connect among people, a desire to be trusted if you do reach out instead of carrying life’s meaning alone.
I can see how this could be interpreted many different ways, though….
I read too much into little bits, but here are some thoughts. I don’t feel comfortable speculating more without knowing more…….
GEL, thank you for the perceptive comment. It actually fleshed out what I was thinking. I often feel lonely in the experience of beauty, perhaps because I am more open to feelings when alone. As you put it so well, a “quest to connect among people” is what I felt in that journal entry. Most of my life I have had lots of friends, but few people I can really open up to.
I’m careful about whom I open up to. People gravitate towards me and I am often comfortably in the role of listener and in control of what material I open up about. It is rare and precious feeling for me to be fully accepted w/ all one’s warts and open up my innermost core. I have done so platonically, romantically, and through familial love.
At times, I was hurt deeply that the agony scars me for life but out of scars, petals bloom. The other occassions when the sweet cocoon of acceptance was so palpable I soared are worth the pain of the times trust was betrayed or love jerked away. I could never go through life feeling numb and avoiding new experiences merely because others didn’t work out. I think I am also most open to my own feelings when alone because of the security that I can be me with no judgements and no fences.
I can’t talk about the experience of beauty here because that is a delicate area I’ve dealt with all my life and felt alone for reasons far different than most would ever deduce. I wrote a blog post about it that I didn’t clarify whether it was fiction or nonfiction entitled “Look into My Eyes”, but I later pulled it when two bloggers guessed that it may have been autiobiographical. It did address a different type of loneliness. Okay, enough locquacity from me this morning!