Somehow typing feels far less aggressive than a pen, calm enough in the new-blue room to squint my way through breakfast, sun-struck and hungry. Trying to calm a ravenous voice, over eager to return from its extended stay in 'need.' As if that were a place. A whole framework of living I've subjected myself to.
Yesterday, out for cocktails, a friend, just accepted to graduate school, rambles on about the importance of personal narratives, of stories, myths and self-understanding. Talks quickly about how much of an iceberg lives beneath the surface, how little we know, how little we see. That we do not need to be diagnosed in order to be taught.
I think of all of the men and women struggling in their lives, with real problems, real diagnostic labels. Unaided. Both of this being a self-indulgent project and of the importance of the self.
How much knowing myself will mean, and how much the story of myself is about being a part of something that much bigger than me, and finding calm in the now of all things, collectively. Coming to God, coming to peace. As a thing that is fed and that feeds. Feeds itself into satisfaction, satiation, being.
That place of need, a hell, a willing intrusion on the project that's God, my begging to be free. As if star dust knew a better sort of ardor.
Up at the University, thousands of backpacks are laid out on a lawn, each with a person's story and name. All suicides. And I think of myself in my darkest moments, the men and women I've witnessed in their darkest moments - how easy it is not to mourn those who were already so clearly on their way. Living with such detachment, discomfort, pain.
There have been times in my life when my suicide would have surprised nobody, but now I am an integrated part, a smiling person who participates. Participates lovingly. I am half there, and on the edge of an unseen cliff I am dangling my body... The forever threat of 'maybe.'
...why do I accommodate you? Why do I give home to all this abhorent wildness, fear, violence and suffering? Why do I make it my own through a warfare of binging and purging? What am I trying to teach myself, trying to say?
Every moment has its story. The sky above black April stick-trees is all white, with the silhouette of a bird fluttering. This state carries only so many people, but still there are so many people, clamouring about in the sound of their mornings.
Is it too much of an overwhelming gift, I think, just to be calm and safe and happy? But here I am in that, today. May the practice be one of writing and sitting.