Leah Sookoo > Recent Status Updates

Sixth dwelling: “It’s dangerous for her to be alone, but she can't bear to have anyone speak to her, either. And so, though she tries hard to cover up her misery, she goes around gloomy and irritable and everybody notices it.

How could she ever begin to say what’s bothering her? These problems are spiritual afflictions and they are unnameable.”

What else?

Not long ago a very wise man told me that souls who do not practice prayer are like people whose limbs are paralyzed.
Even though they have hands and feet, they cannot command them. And so there are souls so caught up in worldly matters that there is no hope for their recovery: they seem to be incapable of entering within themselves.

Finally, by the sea, where God is everywhere, I gradually calmed. I stood looking at the sky. The clouds were the colors of a Raphael. A wounded rose. I had the sensation he had painted it himself. You will see him. You will know him. You will know his hand. These words came to me and I knew I would one day see a sky drawn by Robert's hand.

Words came and then a melody.

The artist seeks contact with his intuitive sense of the gods, but in order to create his work, he cannot stay in this seductive and incorporeal realm. He must return to the material world in order to do his work. It's the artist's responsibility to balance mystical communication and the labor of creation.
I left Mephistopheles, the angels, and the remnants of our handmade world, saying, "I choose Earth."

I HAVE BEEN PACKING IN EARNEST, the sedimentia of four generations, strata of decades, the weight stone of things rolling away. I have sold, given away, disposed of by means of alleyway, obliging friends, strangers, and the Army that Saves, a third of my possessions.

I have seen miracles happen. It is true, I manifest people, events, money. It may be that I want to be superior in a moral yet humble way that others will admire.

The self: unredeemable, worthy of parsed, parsnip worship.

Begotten, Not Made

The only book I want to read at bars and cafes and on park benches and beneath dim lights and in the centre of the hum of conversation because I am completely absorbed by the language and ideas.

Our language, this language that only you and I speak and that nobody has spoken before and that nobody will ever speak again because it's ours and ours alone, is invented every day with one single aim, to weld together the hemispheres of our souls.
- she says.
And Creation's first visible animal appears.
- he says.

Any silence in a film, any white space separating the panels in a comic, any full stop followed by a new sentence on the pages of a novel, the blank spaces on your credit card, and any time two lovers fall silent and look at one another and are suddenly lost for words, it is the terrain of - the living, direct vision of - one moment in the life of this surreptitious, unspeaking god.

Dust, with all its smells, flavour and texture, is made of the union of excretions and silence. But, inside these newmade motes, there will again be silence, and more of it, a scandalous lack of sound that mysticism seeks to recycle and explain by inventing the presence of a mute, surreptitious god, a divinity that never speaks to us but nonetheless somehow demands that we explain ourselves.

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.
You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by-product of your days' triviality.