“The most beautiful life possible has always seemed to me to be one where everything is determined, either by the pressure of circumstances or by impulses…, and where there is never any room for choice.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“Finally, let it be said that to surrender oneself to the will of others (as often happens with lovers and mystics) and so to find oneself at last rid of selfish pleasures, interests, and personal complexes, is in no wise a joyless act, nor one lacking in grandeur.” — Jean Paulhan, “Happiness in Slavery” (intro to Pauline Réage’s Story of O).

“There the conviction was suddenly borne in me that Christianity is preminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“Since Christ demonstrated his love by doing such amazing things and suffering so radically for us, how can your mere words be enough to please the Beloved? Do you know what it means to be truly spiritual? It means to become a slave to God. We are branded with the sign of the cross. It is the token we have given him our freedom. Now he can offer us as servants to the whole world, as he offers himself. This does us no harm. In fact, he is granting us a great boon.

Until we surrender to this divine slavery, we cannot expect to make much progress.” — St. Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle

“[E]very time I think of the crucifixion of Christ, I commit the sin of envy.” — Simone Weil, Letter to a Priest

“Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.

Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church— for we are members of his body. ‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.’ This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church. However, each one of you also must love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband.” — Ephesians 5: 21-33

“[He says of me,] ‘she sees the value both in sadness and in happiness, and revels in intensity and loss of control.’

I realize … that the way I view control is very central. I gain all my power, all my pleasure, from my ability to give myself over to things. [It is] a measure of trust … it is somehow so very simple … I feel that by giving up control I am gaining something so much more valuable … Simply said, I am a receiver, yet in receiving whatever … is thrown at me, I seem to add as much to the meaning of the gift as the giver. In a way, I am giving a gift as well… ” — me, age 18.

“We were sitting after yoga and I was see-through. My skin was gone. I had my eyes closed and then I opened them and it was still the same. The room was dark and there were other people sitting and I was transparent.

The teacher said follow your breath but I couldn’t. I was barely breathing. I didn’t need to breathe because I didn’t have any skin and all the air was already inside. There was nothing between me and the air. It was inside of me and outside of me and in the other people sitting, all at the same time. I didn’t need to do anything about that.

I sat there and tried not to think of how I could not feel my hands or my arms or my legs or anything at all except the air. Then I started to get dizzy.”

I wrote this five years ago. Sitting is still basically the same for me, but I think, at the time, this was a rare experience, and more disorienting (the last bit), and thus merited recording. It’s so strange, how everything always was.

This morning, the orange dog is lying on my sheetless bed, and the sun from the window is on half his body while the other half is in the shadows. I have historical maps of old whaling towns now owned by rich people who don’t live in them on my walls. I also have a map of the place I am from. I have a list of things to do, including writing statements of intent, learning ten new words, leaving the house, and not thinking about children.

The other night, I was talking to an online friend about Deadliest Catch, which is a reality show about Alaskan crab fishermen on the Discovery Channel. I was addicted to this show last winter and no one understood. She said she had the same reaction from her friends, but it usually helped them understand why she watched it when she explained that it is called Deadliest Catch because people actually die.

Then I started telling her about whaling, which was even deadlier. Did you know that the harpoon is just for attaching the gigantic whale to a tiny boat so the whale can drag it around the open seas until it gets tired or kills everyone onboard? Did you know that they took young boys onboard whaling ships for the purpose of crawling into the dead whale’s head to retrieve the sperm oil? Did you know about the beautiful things these men made out of whale teeth and whale bones to bring back to their wives after five years away?

I have been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s letters to Sartre, and although I do not really understand their relationship, I can appreciate how she sometimes signs them “I love you — with a hint of tragedy.”

Last weekend, a small plane carrying two adults and a child collided with a helicopter carrying 6 tourists and crashed into the Hudson River, killing everyone on both aircraft. Last month, I flew from New Jersey to Nantucket and back, with my boyfriend and his flight instructor, in a tiny Cessna 172. We flew over the Hudson, alongside Manhattan, and it was one of the most amazing, breathtaking sights I have ever seen. Travel by small plane is 8 times more dangerous than driving, and 150 times more dangerous than travel by commercial jet. I know people who have friends who have died this way; I know of people who have been severely burned. I went anyway, and I loved it.

I have often wondered about the true value of what I call “peak experiences.” There are certain experiences I have had that have dramatically changed the way I understand everything else in my life. These experiences have altered the way I see. I am not just talking about adventurous outings like flying, and travel in general, which have changed my perception of the world and made me feel incredibly free, but also about more subtle things, emotional and spiritual experiences. Clinging to such experiences is very risky, and is often the first step in the process of getting stuck. For instance, sometimes I worry that the heights to which I sometimes travel, speaking metaphorically, put a damper on the everyday, though I know that truly there is no separation between the sublime and the ordinary.

Another way of putting it would be to say that there is no ordinary world. Even being stuck, even so-called samsara, even sin itself, is included in divine reality. Why do we choose to believe an illusion?

But, still, would it be better to forsake the highs if that somehow dampened the pain of the lows? I have been pondering this question for what seems like my entire life, and I still find myself returning to it, even though it is probably ultimately the wrong question to ask. I have more or less concluded that, no, it would not be better, and furthermore, pain should not necessarily be avoided.

I am not sure how this intersects with questions of danger and risk-taking, which are somewhat different. But I’ll end there, because Royal, the dog, just jumped out the window, so I need to go let him in the back door.