Church Bells

It’s strange how hunger sometimes seems familiar, like a friend.

I eat less here than I do at home, enough, but I don’t walk away from meals feeling full. I wonder if that is the quantity of food I’m eating (it seems less but there isn’t really any way to quantify). Or it may be the sheer unavailability of food in between meals, or that I so look forward to meals that I don’t want to spoil them.

I understand and at the same time somewhat ignore everything I’ve learned in the pat six months. About the body and about health, holistically. It’s so easy to fall back into old patterns; they are seductive.

Easier to hear the church bells when it rains. Easier in the rain to hear the church bells.
How strange we that we don’t keep the people we love, that we must let them go or end ourselves. True, there is never an end, only beginning, and the true Self does not clench, only witnesses, and it is all the same as everything else. But poor small self, the child, who cannot understand or reconcile the idea of absence, permanence, for one of the first times.

It is strange, will be strange then, to be the only daughter. To be the sole remaining carrier. At least with parents we are able to continue them in that respect. With all those with whom we share blood alliances. Without that we can cling only to the thread of humanity, the object of inhabiting the body, or of having inhabited the body before. I suppose that may be a lot to have in common.

This afternoon, looking for an earring which still has not shown up, I found underneath my mattress a hair clip, a rough lead pencil, and a rosary, somewhat delicate, with red beads. Right on time the church bells started ringing as I realized today is the Virgin Mary’s birthday. Sometimes small things strike you, even if you are convinced you do not believe.