People are hard to care for.
When a house is in disorder, it’s easy to impose your will upon it. Wash the dishes, sweep the floor, no negotiating with the dirty laundry pile.
People are complex. Each one with their own set of rules and each person assuming, mostly, that you know theirs.
It’s just so much, all these rules. They change too, people and rules. Everything changes.
People are changing, in unpredictable ways.
Arriving, witnessing, absorbing, connecting, drifting, evolving, leaving, goodbye-ing. How could anyone just assume they know how to act. How could anyone feel comfortable interacting knowing that misunderstanding is almost inevitable. How can anyone be okay not fully being understood.
I yearn for the depth of soul connection, the collect and gather and grow and love. To draw closer to all people and be all things.
Conversations turn into complex calculus in my mind. What do they know, how do I speak, what do they want to hear, how can I relate, what can I share? I want connection, not confusion. I want bonding not confrontation. I am so apparently inherently distinct from others that my way is not the most common way. So I play mind games figuring out how to act.
Such a pang in my heart. I hate that feeling.
See, there’s my attachment wound again. All wounds are attachment wounds. All suffering is attachment related. No suffering occurs when we let go. Pain occurs, not suffering. Pain moves through the body. Suffering haunts the soul. I practice once again “I relinquish the desire to be understood. I accept the confusion. I accept the reality. I accept my confusing reality that’s hard to understand how I could ever accept this at all.
I see liminal spaces online more and more. Underground circuses buried in cave systems, abandoned and illuminated by one single spotlight. I see empty corridors with sickly green fluorescent lights, extending to infinity . I see rooms full of hundreds of toilets and no walls in between, wet floors and white tiles. I see fake plastic trees and old playground slides. I see balcony views from 2265 and I see myself somewhere inside. Overgrown swing sets off old country roads that haven’t been built yet, abandoned in time.
I feel drawn to that empty world, homesick for the unknown and unabridged. I recognize the depression in a connection to this void outside time. I see how I grieve and self impose all these lies. I see the cage I’ve built.
I mirror my feelings of suffering through a yearning for these dim sodium lights. I want to be alone yet I don’t believe in paradise. I feel my connection in an infinity of bleak lines, empty stores, melting decay. Like it rests in my soul this darkness I can’t shake. The gravity of the black hole luring me back to the rust belt womb of some red sky evening. Quiet but for the wind in the tall grass. Home but for the lack of life. A place outside of time and space, made just for me.
When joy appears I feel a rush and then fear and then grim mortal despair. There can be not joy without death, everything always back to death. Seasoning all my favorite moments. Barging in whenever it pleases, not invited. I recognize it’s fleeting, life, like my 15 dreams at night. Once the moments passed, it ain’t never coming back. When I die, all my memories die. See, there’s that attachment again. I’ll practice now. “ I relinquish my attachment to experience and the memories. They are fallible, faded, and likely poorly written anyways. I let them go, but for their intrusive nature. I accept that I am fleeting and doomed but for this present moment.”
I see the backrooms rising in the zeitgeist and I know it’s a herring for the demarcation of an end that’s drawing near, without an idea of when.
No matter the reason or what lies beyond my death, I want to spend as many moments as I can connected to my breath.
Some of the most impactful moments happen when I’m in between, I stop and stare and breathe. I see the grass and trees. I see cars and people and smashed coke cans. The texture of asphalt and the smell of old trash. Theres starlight in the alleyway and moonshine in the ditch. And somehow I feel I’m changing everything in those moments, although that really doesn’t make sense right? All I’m doing is laying witness to the way the universe is dressed. She swirls in black and shines in sparkly light. Her yellow blue and red stars illuminate the dark. Shes fleeting too. One and the same.
So maybe there’s something to it, just stopping to stare at the ground. Maybe she just wanted to be noticed in her shiny gown. Maybe when we look upon her, we’re doing everything we’re ever meant to, and it’s to just look around.
Maybe the rules and games and everything we create is just a distraction. There’s no success or failure. There’s no good or evil. Maybe there’s just a dim light in the dark, and it wanted to be seen.
The monks and shamans - most content in their ways, simply sit in awareness. I’d imagine then that there’s something to it.
So, today, look in front you with the totality of lucid awareness— smell, touch, breathe, and see. Stop and stare, I’m asking you to hold that gaze. On a wall, a leaf, a fire, anything. Nothing more is required.
Remind yourself daily:
All you ever need to do, is be.
