In image: First iteration of the Shell of love, pen, 2015-16 approx.
I look back, as far as I can look back. What led me to each of these moments-- meeting you, each of you, forming some sort of a relationship? What can be said to be the starting point of our relationship? Is it simply the moment when you met me or stumbled upon this page, is it the moment when each of us was born, or is it a much larger, invisible chain that we cannot see and thus rarely think of?
Today I came across these lines in a book. I've come upon them before and like the other times, the weight and meaning of the words stayed with me. As the lines say, Heimarmenê is "the Stoics’ idea of the endless weaving process, the causal “chain” that we experience as fate. We all make an infinite number of choices that we are not even conscious of making, and these choices then produce consequences, which then require us to make other choices which produce further consequences."- Relationships and how to survive them by Liz Greene
* I find it at once difficult and easy to be in relationships. I find it very easy to care for people and do things for them, even strangers and often, especially strangers. At the same time, I find it very hard to not feel trapped by the boundaries of a relationship. Every person has their limitation and so every relationship has its limitations. I will always be reduced or solidified. An image of who I am will always form. How can one live in peace with this knowing? I do not know how others manage but I often struggle and all my life through, my closest relationships feel the impact of this inner dilemma. I must break and renew. I must change how you look at me if you don't do so yourself. Our relationship must alter and burn, burn, burn into a new form over and over. Otherwise, what's the point? If I change every second of every day but how you view me doesn't, how is that close to the truth of life?
Sometimes, like today, I wonder about how little of the whole I can see. How often I feel that I'm in charge of my life, controlling this or that, trying to change this or that while life happens alongside or rather, with me in it. My hands move and I feel as if I move them. I fall in love and say I chose my partner at a certain level. Is there a bigger illusion? Truly, I am in life like a flower to the wind and the sun, growing as I must and have to. Perhaps the only separating thing is this consciousness, this ability to see from somewhere within and beyond this body what it means to be me, to be here, to relate to the world in a way.
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