Here

I have a feeling that writing will be my salvation. I have not built a practice up until now except for writing, which, while the pen has fallen out of my hand for long lengths of time -- those times which I would claim I was "uninspired" or had what I would now describe as a Westerners' approach to procrastination which we label as writers' block if we fancy ourselves writers (I'm pretty sure the latter doesn't actually exist, and that I love that I just used the term "fancy ourselves"). Finding turbulence amidst the flow certainly does exist, of course, and what is referred to as "writer's block" is found in that turbulence, but I would say that it's only the name of a concept that exists in Westerners' minds due to inability to access creative because of suppression or distraction or numbing methods. This is not our fault. I feel angry, so angry at this system of programming that we're subject to. I look into the eyes of someone I want to save and recognize I cannot save them -- that we can only save ourselves, but it hits me like a punch to the gut how excruciatingly difficult this society has made that process for those who fall prey to it. I want to be angry at those of us who do, but I know, really that this is not where the blame can go. I know the true nature of people, and that is that we are good. I know that we are brought to fear, and this makes us blame and steal and kill and do others wrong, but this is not our true nature.

I think about the last few months and how hard they've felt for me and how much and how often I've been reaching out for support. Sometimes I find what I'm looking for and sometimes not (the latter is when I'm forced to reach deep within myself to find something that will save me, even if just for a few moments), but I was thinking tonight about how difficult it must have been for those people who were waking up long before ANYONE in their time was, or at least before they had any sort of means to reach (on the physical plane) others who may have been. I hope that the universal powers that are led those people to peace in some form or another. We hear about Plato, about Aristotle, about Confucius. These are the people who made discoveries that affected human life on a broad scale; these are people who strung together words to create poignant messages in speech, who found meaning in the tangible and intangible and brought these understandings into the light where they could be seen more broadly. These are the people we know about. I would like to honor them; they are honored by many. And I would like to honor, also, the people who were waking up and who were not noticed. The ones who didn't have the means to get their messages heard, or who were silenced or suppressed and who eventually left their bodies in vain, their varying thoughts and ideas and understandings kept tucked into the nooks of their own fruitful minds and hearts. I hope that they surrendered in their last moments of breath to whatever demise they came to. Perhaps they caught a glimpse at eternity, at the nature of existence; perhaps, if reincarnation does indeed exist and a soul's essence is recycled again in physical form, these people knew that to be true in those last moments, and they were at peace. I hope so. (Of course we have heard the stories of how Plato was silenced via poison in his ear, of how many of these great artists, philosophers, and explorers of whose names we know were suppressed and silenced by the fear made manifest in those so afraid to lose their power, those who knew only the weight of their own egos.) While I feel alone often, I am able to talk with my friends who are also waking up about their experiences in their aloneness. We share this bitter, sharp experience, and while it looks as different on each of us as our own fingerprints, as the cells that make up our strands of our hair, as the depth and variety of ink droplets that form the tattoos with which we adorn ourselves, as the ways our toenails our shaped -- the experience is, in its essence the same, just as these things that make up our bodies are. And so we know that we are not alone. I, somehow, can access gratitude through this understanding. As Penelope said, too -- give it up to nature, for there is nothing nature hasn't seen, from the most sublime moments of existence to the most tragic. Nature has seen it all. The earth has held all of it, and us with it.

For how scared I often am in these days, I know I am not the only one who is scared. We are scared for different reasons. Even if your fear is macro, and simply a pervasive and powerful fear because of your clarity around the state of the world and the separateness and confusion within humans, and what is created out of this -- that fear is big. I used the word "simply", but it's not because this fear is simple. It is complex, and interwoven into our very DNA. It is tangled. We feel this fear in our bodies, because it is a part of us. How do we untangle it? And if your fear is that, along with your own personal micro fears around the people you love (and even cling to) most in this world, I am with you. I am with you because you are with me, and this must be, because it's the only way we will make it through. Well the visceral experience of this fear is not something I would wish on anyone, perhaps it is what drives people to find their practice. Perhaps, if we can find our way out of the crippling clutch of its stagnancy, we can find what will save us. Because the sense of peace when we notice the fear, allow it to be, and don't scramble to escape from it ... well, it's what peace is. I've found moments of that, even today. Moments. Moments are something. Moments is how humans assign a construct to a period of time, but what is time anyway. Maybe we can stretch moments. Maybe that's a big part of what this experience is about: allowing moments to be what we need them to be -- allowing them, or even gently pushing them (with practice) to be the exact thing that we need them to be so as to suffer less. If our minds are what experiences suffering, can't our minds also manipulate moments? I'd like to think so. I hope so. I pray that this is so, because a life of suffering would be a long life, and that's certainly where something that could be beautiful if we allow it to be (while immersing ourselves and removing ourselves from whatever is, based on the needs of our health and wellness) becomes more of a perceived curse than a blessing. This is why we practice. I am learning.

I remembered another practice: breath. The breath. The breath. Here, here it is. Steady breath. In, and out. Accept and release. Know and let go. Remember and forget.

I talked to Penelope tonight for the first time since I was in Colorado, and it brought me peace even a bit more. She spoke to her own experience in facing what death is, and a story that she had shared with me in our work together when I was back there. She used to look at babies'  faces and see the face of death -- she would see the baby age and die. It must have been horrifying to see this. (I will mention here that another healer I went to in Boulder had a grieving process around his little girl, who was/is very much alive -- he grieved that one day she will die. This is what a preemptive process to the start of healing is: holding this truth. Wow.) And Penelope reminded me of this very real and very powerful message: the human mind cannot process death. Death is too large, too vast, too mysterious. Try as our human minds might, we cannot. It's easier for someone to say "everybody dies. We're all going to die." and I think that some people who say that have truly faced it, and others are bypassing because we all know this of course to be true in our minds. But I believe that most, in this day and age, have not actually processed and grieved and known this to be true. They haven't hung out with this truth, haven't sat with it, haven't breathed it in. And this is my process now. This is the start of my journey. It is my awakening. I am no longer spiritually bypassing -- the spiritual path is not trendy. This is not trendy. And I am understanding that for those who are on it, for those who perhaps have been chosen for it -- we don't care. I no longer care what is trendy. There is so much more. I don't have the space to care, at least not right now, because I haven't reconciled everything else that is. Everything else takes up all the space I have. I'm at capacity, yet here I am writing. Practicing. Building capacity. Wow -- I have said that term before, and it was over a year ago. That was some layers ago. Penelope spoke to something I am experiencing on a consistent basis now, and that is this: even when you think you have found peace one day, the next you fall apart. It's the nature of being. (And it is breath.) In relating to my previous post, I am remembering now the words that this is why we practice. So we are better equipped to find resiliency. Well, this is why I am writing. This is my practice. This, and breath, and prayer. I can develop other practices, but writing is perhaps the strongest, the one I've always felt the most called to, and is perhaps the most calming to me, even in his inability to fully capture an experience. Words fall so short, yet in practice I can strive to expand. [I actually may be too far out for meditation right now, which is why yoga does feel helpful when I force my bones to move into asana, and I bring my breath to match the movement. Actual yoga -- not the "yoga" movements so many Westerners occupy. True yoga, when I find it, is helpful, though not as consistently pulling as writing is for me.] While I am very much using my thinking mind to write these words, I am also using this as a tool as to get these thoughts out of my head and onto the fabric. To make them texturized. To process further. So here they are, out of my head. Only a small, small fragment of the many thoughts and knowings and beliefs and connections going on in my thinking mind, but a small fragment is better here than in my mind. Better here, where it might help someone else to make a connection that helps them to aid in their healing. Better here, where the physicality of these thoughts relieves even the smallest bit of pressure in my thinking-mind and allows me to aid in my own process of healing as well. Turning away from words into the beingness of empty space, though, is something writing does not embody, due to its very nature of being constructed of words. I have found liminal space a few times, though not since this experience has become more acute. Paradoxically, writing slows down the words in my head. What matters are the words right here, right now. Free write. Breathe. Don't give any shits about the trendiness of what is on the page. Here it is.