Dear Diary,
Slowly falling and crunching underfoot snow, barely audibly swishing coffee in the thermos, Kleboniškis emanating some inexplicable mystique in every season. I stride along, laying out in my mind plans for the near and somewhat further future – what I’ll eat today, what I’ll work on tomorrow on my first day back from a brief vacation, what needs to be bought for a small weekend renovation. I marvel that in such snowfall the forest is full of people, also having decided for an hour or two to cross the bridge separating the routine of the city from the fairy tale of the forest. And suddenly with a crash returns that which, essentially, I came here for. Thoughts stop, images crumble, and shoulders straighten, as if for a moment leaning against the nearest pine to rest my unwieldy oak life cross. Again there’s no “tomorrow”. Again there’s no “around the bend”. Again there’s no “other”. Only the forest remains, pines reaching to the sky and slowly falling snowflakes. Perfect down to the last needle, down to the last cone and absolutely requiring no effort from you, no movement to make it even more perfect or somehow supplement it. You could sink right into the ground right here in this very spot – it wouldn’t notice, it wouldn’t make the slightest difference.
Emptiness, silence and peace permeated with a complete sense of wholeness. A wholeness we try day after day to fill with something more, to leave something behind, to create something. For instance – relationships. What kind of normal person can enjoy the fullness of emptiness without having created relationships in it? Out of it. With it itself. And, actually, has anyone seen relationships? Touched them? Smelled them? Measured them? At least seen a photograph of them? Or a drawing? An engraving? No, in the physical world they simply don’t exist. But we make cosmic efforts creating something that doesn’t exist, guided by hundreds of books that pour from empty to empty about it. And we do it with very serious faces – after all, we’re creating relationships! A person should feel good when thanks to them another person becomes happier than they were. And bad when thanks to them another person becomes unhappier than they was. There, that’s all the relationships. If that’s not there, the latter don’t exist either, no matter how many smart books you might read.
Or a somewhat more tangible creation – a project. Goodness gracious, how many projects have been created from nothing over professional years and released into the external world. With what pomp. With what pride. And for what invoices! Where are they? Eighty percent of addresses collected today throw out a banal “page not found”. The remaining ones still open a colorful page on a shining screen where each of us can learn the founding history of some company nobody cares about, its field of operation and the phones and email addresses of its director and accounting. Is this really worth the time that was devoted to it. Is this really worth anything at all. Is it worth being proud of this, as some kind of footprint in the outer world. I doubt it. Simply littered, littered, littered and happy.
The need to constantly create something, constantly buy something, constantly fill one’s own boundless emptiness is the only obstacle preventing us from feeling the fullness of life, of the moment. It is our unwieldy cross, consisting of all our “I still absolutely must have this, and this and this. And then also that.” Well, the forest is over, the coffee drunk, so we lean it against the pine, painfully whimper as we hoist it onto our shoulder, and with a deep sigh stride onward. Into tomorrow. Still need to create a story! :-)
Dedicated to my friends for the beautiful words about my creativity on the New Year’s balcony :-)
