...And the Film reel keeps rolling

Once my mind likes something it plays the movie of that experience over and over, like an addiction.  I become addicted to this idea and can’t seem to let go like an obsession. No matter that I have gone beyond taking pleasure in this idea or memory to somewhere dark, where the thought is almost mechanical..

A chair, a table, and screen.  Sterile walls, the room is empty. A projector sits on table as you sit on a the chair neither uncomfortable or comfortable.  There is no color, just a reel that reels forward projecting images before you onto a screen.  It is dark, the only light is the projector light. All that can be heard is the reel and your own breath.  On this screen you see images, images that have no sequence but somehow are familiar.  You have seen them somewhere else. 

The reel keeps reeling forward, images upon images, some evoke a mood of sadness, some happiness and others nothingness just memories, familiar experiences. It is unknown how much time has passed while in this room or even if there is a concept of time here.  Suddenly the reel has no more film, yet it keeps reeling forward and there is only light projected onto the screen.  This is what life could be if we stopped for a moment…just pure light.

In Transit...

There is something that happens to time when you travel. It sort of becomes irrelevant.  Surreal even, with all the time zones we sort of “float” through from one to the next, existing.  Just breathing for a moment, in transit.  Accepting this state of being…I wish I could accept this to be the accurate state of existence, its in that moment that the truth lies. 

I am chasing after shadows holding onto impermanence like sand; it slips through my fingers leaving dusty remnants of once what was – such is time, a desert with mirages that keep us drudging forward the hope of some new acquisition some new pleasure only to fade, luxurious castles of sand, with one gust of the almighty wind, it is swept away, engulfed into a drifting tide.. part of the story of another dune…impermanent in all its glory and experience…fleeting

And yet we hold on? Because we are seeking permanence we are seeking the truth something to hold on to something to hold on to us lest we drift away and disappear – but disappearance is inevitable….acceptance is what we need to work toward….its what I need to work toward. Acceptance of this state of impermanence in which we currently exist…

But the question is then do we really exist if all we know is impermanence? Changing, temporary, not ours to own to have forever…what is forever? A false promise of time….

A Candy shop...

I am that child, that child we have all seen.  The one who doesn’t want to leave the toy store, who only wants a particular toy.  The child whose parents negotiate and plead and eventually steal her away from the store forcefully.  We have been painful witnesses to these scenes thinking “Why can’t she just have the one toy?”

The child is then taken to a candy store and then begs and pleads to have only a specific type of sweet the kind that would rot her teeth.  She cries and cries for this specific sweet, negotiates pleads prays to parent Gods but to no avail.  The parents then forcefully take her away and out from the store


…this is my condition…this is our condition we hold on and on…and when the mirages slip away we wonder why?

:)

Little Red Sports Car...

Vroom Vroom

How do you journey through life? How do you actually live?  Are you living within the moment the hour, the month, the year – your life? Are you living your whole life at once, so much so that you’re not living at all…you don’t exist?....

That last question, yes that’s me.  Its a lot of us, not taking the present into account.  Now that the future lies before me as an open barren road, I worry whether I will be able to accomplish my life’s work and build the city of achievements that I envision for myself here in the landscape of my mind.  I don’t know where I want to build, still looking for that perfect plot, presently trodding through the desert caught in a sandstorm.  I can’t see….

In moments like these, these “transition phases”, you need to “embrace the creative process” as someone wise advised me the other day.  The GIANT question mark that’s following you around, you need to embrace that too.  NOT the fear associated with the question mark of “Will you be able”.  That should not even be a question.  No no, embrace the “What do you really want” question mark. What do you want your life’s work to be? I am trying.

I remember a 4th grade teacher saying once to my mom during a parent teach conference “She’s always in a rush.”  I never understood how he perceived that of me, what exactly I did where he observed this truth of my nature.  Years later this hand me down observation haunts me, and remains to be true.  My new years resolution is to SLOW DOWN…what’s the rush?

I was always proud about the way I am open and free, which while a quality to be admired as one gets older needs to be curbed to a degree at least initially.  There are certain things that come with time (or so I have been told), time is mysterious that way.  I finally get it now.  I finally understand!

What kind of car are you when it comes to your life? Presently I am a little red Porsche.  Thrilling I know, but the way I’ve been driving, its time I trade it in for something more calm more smooth…

Rather than admiring the qualities of others of focus and discipline thus their ability to drive better, its time I start to steer my life into the direction I want to take it toward. Contemplating on that direction…

Fear & Surrender : My Heart Flies

There are these moments when your heart grows so big it can consume the entire world into its love.  It is suddenly freed of the restraints the ropes of fear that hold your heart back from expanding and filling up with love until it explodes.  Ego is one of these fears that if the heart explodes if "I" explode then what will "I" be, "I" will be finite no longer?  I will not exist.  The finite mind, the finite ego, the finite fear cannot understand this, that by not existing as finite one becomes infinite, fearless and so large….

I felt my heart break through that cage today to be as it is, as I am…open and free of my fears.  My fears have been consuming me like dark spirits eating away at the lush gardens of my self, my love for this world and the beings in and beyond it.  I want to embody unconditional all encompassing love. I don’t want to be afraid and that fear comes from attachment and expectations….I want to let these go.  I want to let go.

Oh how the wind burns me so.  Tossing me about…my heart is fragile but I forget it can be gentle and strong, fertile and flexible all at once….if and only if I let go of my fear it will take care of me.  My heart, the wind an all consuming love will take care of me…not my fear!

I am a bird freed from a cage….flying my heart flies see how it flies up and away.

There was a passage in Paulo Coelho’s novel The Pilgrimage the very novel that is said to have inspired him to write the Alchemist (my all time FAVORITE book), where his teacher, guide or Master who is guiding him along this pilgrimage to Santiago Compostela, teaches him about love or Agape:

"Agape is the love that consumes," he repeated that phrase that best defined this strange kind of love.  "Martin Luther King once said that when Christ spoke of loving one's enemies, he was referring to agape.  Because according to him, it was 'impossible to like our enemies, those who were cruel to us, those who tried to make our day-to-day suffering even worse.'  But agape is much more than liking.  It is a feeling that suffuses, that fills every space in us."

Paulo later goes on to describe the results of a meditative experience associated with trying to experience Agape...

I spread my arms so that agape could flow, and a mysterious current of blue light began to wash through me...The light spread first to our surroundings and then enveloped the world, and I started to weep.  I wept because I was re-experiencing the enthusiasm of my childhood; I was once again a child, and nothing in the world could cause me harm... the strong blue light that was entering and leaving me was now spreading throughout the world... I felt that it enclosed the world, it penetrated every door and every back alley, touching every person alive for at least a fraction of a second.

That is how I feel now, love is pouring down from above out through my heart and to you, through all of us and back in this circular fashion.  No end, no beginning.

Wind: my Friend, my Lover, my God

Something calls me to move forward, move on.  Something calls me but I know not what! All I know is my present situation needs to change to receive the new circumstances that the currents of life are pushing me into…I am not resistant, if I turn rock from wave, it will be more painful. Let me be the wave then, and allow the currents to move me, the natural forces that be, move me on and forward to where I belong.  Which is not one place, which is nowhere in the nameless.

But how do you change or fix a sinking boat while you’re in it and the currents are still flowing onward in the sharpest of fashions? How does one stay afloat? A whisper whispers you listen to the whispers of your heart the gentle nudges that allow you to repair that boat… I am just following the melody of the whispers.

The wind is stirring up, waking and mustering up its might for an even larger storm that is on its way to stir up my life…the present storms are now dim, the next one will be a sun shower that will give me the answer to the questions in mind.

I saw you I saw the wind…I knew it was time you whispered you blew your gentle breeze awakening me from my trance telling me it was time to go, you friend freed me from my cage lifted the cup and suddenly I was free and here I am blowing with the winds whims, a living leaf… I am scared but I know its your arm that leads me across and we fly together across creation as you prop me somewhere else where I am meant to be, and living in your will in this way…there is nothing more joyous because you know me you know where I am meant to be

I smile at your ability to lift me up and plop me down somewhere else or in some other kind of situation…

I try to work on my patience I am trying to enjoy this ride of uncertainty it is something I have hoped and even wished for through the whispers of my heart.

I lay here arms open wide….fearful but ready trying to surrender…. I aspire to live in the beauty of your will…blow me far far away

Questions Part II

My inspiration for the poetic flow in my previous post was the following by Langston Hughes (also the introduction to A Raisin in the Sun):

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore--

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over--

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Questions about the future are like dreams, like wishes we wonder will we ever achieve, ever realize these milestones in our lives that our heart so achingly thirsts to behold...

I realized after reading over my previous entry, it is I who is in a holding pattern - It is not all of us twenty somethings and for that matter 30, 40 , 50 and so on somethings.  If we are in a holding pattern it is because we have chosen to be there! Eureka! An epiphany about my/our current state of mind…its time to demolish these walls!  Time to unblock the arteries to our hearts, and breathe in a full breath taking in all of life's possibilities and exhaling out all that is out of our control...smiling in return at the beauty that surrounds us.  I stand on a peak tonight alone, strong.

The most important thing I left out about the whirling dervish, is that eventually he finds God at the end of his spins! ;)