You Have One Message

Last week, I had a dream that I was hanging out with some kind of "angelic" being in a vast, undifferentiated space. I was invited to play, so I made up two short, vertical lines a small distance apart from each other, with a long, crazy, squiggly line linking the two that looked like an erratic heartbeat glyph on a cosmic monitor. The design appeared as I imagined it, immediately, in my field of vision. After a moment's hesitation, I wrote a descriptive word underneath it: "Monster".

My friend seemed to thoughtfully examine this creation, and reproduced it exactly, a little to the right, with a different caption (in my own writing): "Moving Stillness Being Blessed."

Hmm.

All of this activity took place in a simple, childlike way, from an innocent, intuitive heart. My companion didn't criticize the original design, but made an offer to my offering. I realized that one was not better or more true than the other. One was not more beautiful or ugly. I could feel the dreamlike tug of opinion before it dissolved like fog in the sunshine.

I turned to this being, my friend, being so brightly indistinct, and tried to understand all this in a way that I could carry into the multilayered complexity that life enjoys so much. I knew I was dreaming, all of a sudden. And just in the turning toward, I felt something in a very deep way. Talking about it scatters the impact, but it seems to need expressing.

On the surface is the obvious message that opinions and comparisons are meaningless to reality-in-itself, whatever that is, which accepts absolutely any description or design laid upon Her, like a tattoo birthed in the heart to appear, organically, on the flexing skin of all that is. She doesn't care what you call it, what meaning is ascribed or which logical path was designed to support this whole thing. Whatever's clever, She might say.

Underneath this lovely indifference and impersonality (so that we can be personable) lies a song in a language that appears foreign, until the body and mind let go into the hearing. The song isn't about the design or the path; the song is of the singing, itself, the very act of calling an "object", thought, feeling, wish, tree, dance, breath, birth, death, particle/wave into being by noticing it. Noticing is a miracle. Deeply noticing is blessing.

In ancient days, blessing was done with some kind of sacrificial blood, great ceremony, honor and ritual, people impressing the importance of another person, place or thing upon their minds and hearts for a lifetime. In a way, this was daily life brought into the spotlight of community theater, an attempt to remind ourselves of the sacred realms we are steeped in. Get it, people--we are incarnate, we are temporal, we are fragile, and in this cosmic blink lies tremendous beauty that is missed when we forget to see and feel it, when we deem being alive to be so common and painful that it is beneath our notice (until we realize it is slipping away, perhaps). 

Explaining everything to death intellectually may be necessary--I don't know. What I do know is that I, like every other thing, am full of some kind of sacrificial blood in which the world appears and disappears, like a dream. I look at a fencepost, and it comes startlingly into being out of the Vast Soup, with color, texture, dimension and the scent of peeling paint. It does this just for me, with me, right now, in a moment never to be repeated, in absolute uniqueness. Fencepost Maria has arisen. No other human can ever be this experience in just this way. This is true every second of every day. No one will ever "understand" this, because there is nothing (thank god) to be understood. Just one creative miracle after another, for anyone willing to be this.

It is the act, the silent singing of everything into being that is so spectacular and effortless. I don't know where this song comes from or why it is. I just know when I'm fighting it.

Loneliness

As a busy "caregiver" and "artistic type", I'm familiar with the value of aloneness. Sometimes I just need to be away from the demands and distraction of other people in order to think/feel deeply, to get a clearer sense of whatever is emerging from the crazy sea of worldly data and craving my creative attention. I love these spaces in my life. Arguing with that call is almost impossible, anyway; putting it off too long seems to be hazardous to the health of my psyche.

Loneliness, though, has been quite a demon in my story. At first glance, it is entirely different in quality from voluntary solitude, tending to appear as a hollow portrait of lack and emptiness, with nothing voluntary about it. I've been lonely off and on throughout my time in schools, jobs, marriages and therapies--alone in my head, heart, and in the midst of crowds. I used to think it was just depression or some kind of inherited kink in the energetic hose. I could never figure it out, really, and cycled for a long time through stern lectures from my adult-self to the "needy" child within.  I was too bright, too young, too whatever to be so pathetic...I just wanted to knock it off. If it was biology, then to hell with it. Wasn't about to be jerked around by fluctuating hormones...and so forth.

I learned, over time, to distract myself from the pain of loneliness in many different ways. It was another fine coping skill to add to my repertoire. It worked, too, for a while.

What is it about middle-agelessness that so quickly peels off the illusions? Why is it that the thick buffalo-head, so effective in scaring away the really difficult states of being for so many years, just falls off? Does it get too heavy, too ridiculous, too painful? I don't know. What I do know is that there comes a point when there is no one left to blame--not even oneself--in the vast, empty space of one's own being, in which purposes and distractions rise and fall like the grass, through seasons which pass more and more quickly.

Here I am in the whirling year (oh my god, it's June, already?!), and I wake up in the middle of the night as I turn over into the cold side of the bed. Before the first thought manages to surface, I feel myself, somewhere, to be in pain. I pull a pillow into my stomach and try to go back to the sweet peace of unconsciousness. But the silence is heavy, my heart is heavier, and I'm too tired to think my way out of it.

Now, this is an ideal situation, and deep down, I know it. I recognize this demon as one I've never befriended, that will sit on me until I die if I don't get into where it lives, if I don't accept this invitation.

Oh...the surrender is almost instantaneous. Oh, the pain is intense! It's like a room that dwarfs me, as if I've fallen into a forbidden void...I just breathe, and wait. I find that I want to see what comes, and so, it does...grief, sadness, and fear...not of a final thing, like death, but of more monuments to grief and sadness. There is an ocean of them, built by me, and then built by all of humankind. The pain is too vast to be personal. Everything, as a matter of fact, is too vast to be personal!

I look into this feeling in my heart, in my body, circulating through the local and the universal, and find it rising and falling in a familiar fashion, like notes in a song. The grief and fear are brief and lovely, perfectly formed, only to dissolve in that slippery way that all forms have. It doesn't matter, I realize, how many of these memories and monuments I build. They are already gone, and I can't hang on to them to save my life. Something has unclenched. I find myself in state of gratitude for the impermanence of life, the fullness of it. Not a discreet, objective state of gratitude, but an active explosion of gratitude, an awestruck participant in this throwing up and tearing down of feeling-forms.

Loneliness has naturally transformed into a spontaneous beauty that sadness can't mar in any way. It isn't that some quality has been added to ease the pain--it's that nothing can be added or lost (even the belief in gaining or losing). What sort of being is this that can think, feel, believe, disbelieve, learn, unlearn, so permanent in its flux? An inalienable human, being deeply.

I don't sleep the rest of the night, as the demon has become a sort of muse, whose depths are fascinating. There is no regret over the length of time this complex relationship with "alone" has taken to develop. I realize, also, that voluntary solitude is a rough, uncommitted sketch, a thin layer between here and nowhere, the familiar tip of a giant iceberg barely showing above the waves. Further exploration is always called for. I love it, and I love you.