the meaning of life, by Patti Smith

My first sense of life was that of motion, of being lifted, and the beating of my mother’s heart. Then, as consciousness pressed, I turned in the radiance of my father’s mind. When I closed my eyes I could feel the world spin. When I reached out I could feel the breath of care. Bound, within my blood, was their love, their burning and their discordant prayers.

Yet time makes ravens of us all and swiftly, it seemed, I fled from their grasp. The sea was a glass. The sky an immeasurable path.

Guided by the knowledge of them I journeyed fettered, free. And as all before me, I have questioned, grateful for the privilege of being able to ask: What is my task? Why do we exist? All answers produce the pain of recognition, emptiness and joy.

To prey upon stillness, to suffer dawn
To bow before God, to administer grace
To unveil space, to be spirited away
To lift a child
   into the reigning air
   where the voice of heaven
   chirps like a bird


Copyright © Patti Smith 1992

[from More Reflections on The Meaning of Life, edited by David Friend and the Editors of Life Magazine, Little Brown and Company, 1992.]

Los Nacimientos by Pablo Neruda

Yesterday I found out a wonderful man named Rob Hollister had passed on, after a handful of years fighting cancer and a good many days laughing. He was such a cool cat; honorable, interested, insightful. His passing, though inevitable, still resonates hard and brings tears to my eyes just typing these words.

The universe has impecable timing, and while passings must echo the loss, arrivals herald a call of anticipation, excitement, nervous joy and I’m glad that I can witness Ava’s birth so soon after Rob’s passing.

The circle of life is no joke.

This beautiful poem by Pablo Neruda is just right. (thanks, thelittlestblog.com)

los nacimientos (births)

we will never have any memory of dying.
we were so patient
about our being,
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,
and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.
nor do we even keep
the memory of being born,
although to come into being was tumultuous and new;
and now you don’t remember a single detail
and haven’t kept even a trace
of your first light.
it’s well known that we are born.
it’s well known that in the room
or in the wood
or in the shelter in the fishermen’s quarter
or in the rustling canefields
there is a quite unusual silence,
a grave and wooden moment as
a woman prepares to give birth.
it’s well known that we were all born.
but if that abrupt translation
from not being to existing, to having hands,
to seeing, to having eyes,
to eating and weeping and overflowing
and loving and loving and suffering and suffering,
of that transition, that quivering
of an electric presence, raising up
one body more, like a living cup,
and of that woman left empty,
the mother who is left there in her blood
and her lacerated fullness,
and its end and its beginning, and disorder
tumbling the pulse, the floor, the covers
till everything comes together and adds
one knot more to the thread of life,
nothing, nothing remains in your memory
of the savage sea which summoned up a wave
and plucked a shrouded apple from the tree.
the only thing you remember is your life.

-pablo neruda