Bliss Is.

“Nate, you should be in constant bliss.” …is what he said to me. We were both in a crowd, we were both where the concert played, and our voices soughed. In this coffeeshop we were looking into one another and talking about what we found there. And as many of my conversations will do, things deftly turned to G-d.

 We talked and chatted and I listened as he spoke. He made that comment about bliss in reference to what life lived with G-d should feel like. Constant bliss was the precise words he used.

 He said the words, and in an instant, standing there with my coffee mug cooling against my fingerprints, I saw it happen; I saw the eye of his mind careen backwards into his life and fasten onto all the copious deficits of happiness and joy that, to him, are bound solely to eschew straight out of separation from G-d. There were craters in his experience, blown wide with ash and smoke, ribbons of pains and white hot hurts like canyons that followed him all his life. The requisite of myopic dispensation, selective intimacy. Addiction.

 And above the slake of periodic honesty with himself I saw a kind of cloud, like a death vapor with it's soul hunger quenched like red iron in cold oil, rising above the strangling fray of disappointment, and instead of striking with its ice fingers like it had with all of his grandfathers, it lifted the gaze from the derelict to, oh just barely above.

 All it took was just that much altitude, and in the vision I was having into the marked open envelope of my friends mind, I could sense a change in the air, a freshening intake, a tingle on the tongue. Just above where the wisp cloud strode, like a spread sheer sheet pulled out and turned straight into a layer of fog, I could tell from where I stood that my friend could see all the way to the horizon. Floating there with his sight cleared of the dark mist of his past, he could see how the world should be. He could glimpse what life in G-d should be and to him it was a fathomless bliss. A dizzy Joy. A constant tarry.

 Who knows how many teachers of the bible had told him that his life should be full of bliss. Maybe only two, I don't know. Maybe it was a friend that he lived with that had talked with him late into the night from their bunks, over old coffee. Maybe it was a homeless man with a grasp of wonder who whispered it in his ear over a cold and wrinkled dollar.

 Whomever his influence had been, I could see with clarity the flowing ease with which he believed these things, how close he stood to the words that he chose. His eyes were tracking on mine with a smile.

 And I’m glad he believed that then.

 I remember thinking about his words year in and year out since then, and saying to myself, “Yea. Bliss constantly. That’s what I deserve. Why am I not in constant bliss?”

 But I don’t believe it now. I don’t deserve Constant Bliss. And I don't mean that I think I'm not good enough to have bliss in in ever ebbs, either, like I believe that I'm not worth it.

 You see, it’s just that the power of bliss isn’t that we have it in comparison to not having it. But that this bliss, when we have it, well... it anchors us in a moment. It's so good because the feeling lingers, and time sits down a moment.





 I think bliss should be here sometimes, and heartache in other times. I think there is meaning in the fact that the palette of colors that is human emotion needs to be used in full, not squeezed till all the ochre is gone, all the phthalo blue dried up, and the rods and cones we use to see them shriveled all out to dust and wind and longing.

 Give me bliss, yes, but only at the mountaintop maybe. When I kiss the metal rope anchors at the top of the dry and raspy climbing rout. When the bread is piping hot, or when there is ice cream on my lips. Let bliss be there, but let it surprise me with it's being.

 And give me sorrow at all the wasted years without her, you know? Give me fear when it’s all uncertain, give me rage when all I've worked for is stolen.

 Give me vertigo when I step near the edges, hunger when I can't afford the least of these, give me that treasured and wonderful gravity pull kind of longing when I see the stars.

 Let them come and go like people do, let the feelings come and go. We are fashioned in a high degree of complexity for more reasons than we can ever know. We know good and sour terrible emotions because we are made to know what the world means with our feelings. To touch the world with as many sensations as a body will allow.

 I'll take bliss. But also give to me its sister, just as strong as, with roots that run both in parrallel and as deep as, the opposite and strangely similar, the weeping woman of the spirit; Heartache.