Theresa Luttenegger

I was at the beginning of one of the most profound and jarring transitions of my life when I stumbled deeper into Bob Dylan’s poetry. I had turned my entire life upside down, leaving everything and everyone I knew and loved in a painful, chaotic wake, including a version of myself crushed by the weight of mundane reality.

I was searching for Johanna—a (near) abstract perfection, my romantic (and arguably, disembodied) notion of the transcendent—in myself. I was also the fool who was in desperately love with her, unable to reconcile the mundane with the transcendent. In some ways I knew what I was searching for was somewhere within, but I did not know how to find it (or her) while I felt, like Dylan’s protagonist, stranded in an ordinary life. I felt stranded, quite ironically, in a loving partnership with the soulful Louise (who still holds a handful of rain) a beautiful home, a successful business, and a life many others would be deeply satisfied with.

Still I walked away, burning to live a truth I felt I was close to, but all these years later I realize I had barely glimpsed. My wiry, unruly hair was evidence of previous years—long surges of electrical light that my body could barely withstand and my psyche could not. I found myself new and strange, partway around the globe, sipping espresso and Côtes du Rhône in the dimly lit cafes of Paris, Poitiers, Chartres, and Vezelay with a lover who was equally as new and strange to me as I was to myself. He snapped these photos of the woman I was (barely able to recognize herself) somewhere in Paris’ 10th arrondissement on a cold, blustery day in December 2010. Now, so many years later, I see that version of myself as Johanna.

I love her, still, for her dreamy gaze, her utter naïveté, and the wellspring of strength, courage, resilience, tenacity, and integrity she carried deep within her but had yet to fully realize or embody. She sat perched on the edge of a well-worn bistro chair—part star gate, part humble throne, wholly the undeniable threshold of a magnificent and terrifying unknown.

I wouldn’t be here but for her.

Just as you wouldn’t be here but for a thousand brave and crazy versions of yourself ferrying your infinite heart across unfathomable waters. I honor them all.

The vessels (the thousand versions of ourselves) that have carried us home are now resting on the shores of Love and are no longer necessary. We have come aground. In the best possible of ways. We are meeting ourselves and each other anew. I’ve found this meeting to be quite peaceful, sensual, and deeply satisfying. I feel in many ways, filled or fleshed out, substantial, grounded, and nourished. Everything might still look the same, and yet…it is not. Surely, the cosmic punchline is that, by appearance, it is all quite natural. You might even say, a bit mundane.

Maybe the scenery, set direction, or players will change—surely they will as nothing is fixed. For now, it feels a bit to me like we are in between acts; the stage crew has not yet replaced the old props with new. And (I feel so viscerally) his next act is, as yet, unwritten—will only be written at the moment we live it. But the need for external validation or reflection of this extraordinary shift no longer feels imperative. Inside I know. I am here.

It is a beautiful, beautiful play. Play on!

As I like to say, it's not just that appearances that arise in life are empty; it's that appearances themselves are the emptiness arising.  The emptiness actually appears physically.  In other words, the emptiness is not empty of appearance.  And conversely, appearances do not appear empty.  Appearances are emptiness and emptiness appears.

~Dakpo Rinpoche

Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks
When you’re tryin’ to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin’ you to defy it
Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there’s nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

In the empty lot where the ladies play blindman’s bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they whisper of escapades out on the “D” train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it’s him or them that’s insane
Louise, she’s all right, she’s just near
She’s delicate and seems like the mirror
But she just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna’s not here
The ghost of ‘lectricity howls in the bones of her face
Where these visions of Johanna have now taken my place

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain
It’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial
Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while
But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the mustache say, “Jeez, I can’t find my knees”
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seem so cruel

The peddler now speaks to the countess who’s pretending to care for him
Sayin’, name me someone that’s not a parasite and I’ll go out and say a prayer for him
But like Louise always says
You can’t look at much, can ya man
As she, herself, prepares for him
And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys and the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain