a wonderful reason for mindfulness

i am recognizing that to be knowledgeable in the moment there is a need to confront not just unhappiness and choices, but happiness as well.  to somehow see it all simultaneously.

my life is well married with proportions of each, heavy on the side of happiness.  and so i need to be mindful of gratitude, and understanding of others who have not taken my same paths, who do not know what i know. for certainly, i do not know what they know.

spring!

my window

i live here.  i come from very precise bearings,

born between two people who have exactly 

precise bearings, and grew up at the intersection

of all that i've experienced, alongside of all that

everyone i have come into contact with has experienced. 

i am a remarkably failed human being with absolutely

soul bending momentary experiences.  just like you.

bottom left

i live here.  me, my name is france delapaux.  i am twenty-seven.  i live with my mother, three sisters, and my brother, alphonse.  my father is a swine.  i see him time to time in the gutter.  that is fine by me.  worthy of the streets.  i, i work hard.  i erase my past with every footstep i take, except for my mother.  i will always carry my mother and for this she is not my past but rather always by my side.  i love her.  but she becomes smaller than me every day.  i see her disappearing, although she always has a smile on her face.  i smile back down distant hallways.  i lay on my bed.  i touch my breasts.  i own me. no man will ever own me again. my mother lays in her bed alone.  her lamp is out. i read late into the night.  i go to work dreary eyed and am teased.  they think it is a boy.  it is!  it is all sorts of boys and men, and even women, Dostoevsky, Hemingway, Faulkner, McCarthy, Anais Nin, even Kingsolver.  i don't discriminate.  i lay with them all.  i am a wild lover who has never left home, who has never once said yes to a man.  this is my window.  you've never, even in your mind, touched a woman like me, a woman who is made just like this.  and you never will.  i won't let you.

who, behind which window?

in The Unbearable Lightness of Being when Sabina asks Tomas what it is he is after with women, he replies, Maybe the very smallest...unimaginable details...tiny things that make one woman totally unlike any other.
 

i wonder just how much it is that distinguishes one person from the next, or how little.