Reflections

September 2024

2. On bliss

They ask me, sometimes, do I still feel it? All these years later? And they look at me carefully. Concernedly. They question me as if I’m in some sort of existential danger. As though it were something dubious, unclassifiable; possibly anti-social. Something that might need a degree of exorcism.

And I could easily say no, it’s gone now. It lasted for a while, which was lovely, but now it’s gone. Like dew on grass. Evaporated; dried up. Gone. I’m completely normal again. Healed up in body and in brain. And then they’d say, oh well. That’s good. But the truth is much more interesting than that. Because my bliss persists. I walk up underneath the trees each morning and I find that it’s still here with me.

It’s with me when I wake. When sunlight seeps between the slatted blinds, so does my bliss. Sweet time of nothing, when there’s no-time. When everything is equal. When the morning is perfectly empty, yet completely full. And often it’s still there at night.

It’s in some kinds of music: always I can tell from just the first few bars. And in some colours, in some art. It exists in tiny movements of each leaf and pours through every sunset’s stillness; each felted flutter of a small bird’s wings. It’s there in midday’s sun-slant and deep within the moon’s cool silver. Inside the rhythm of the rain.

So, yes. My bliss is still a part of me. I cannot share it any more than I can share my pain, except perhaps in poetry: but already you will know that. Sometimes, in my poems, I can pass it on. I can sense the bliss in others and often they can pick it up in me. We don’t talk about it.  We don’t have the words. We never have to: we already know.

Sometimes it bubbles up in places where it’s not supposed to be.  And then I’m laughing to myself or dancing on my own. And I don’t care. The bliss is everything I need. Mind-altering bliss. Still here with me. I walk beneath the trees each precious morning and I find my bliss still with me.