i have nearly forgotten the feeling of home. Of making plans, of knowing the restaurant owner. Of having somewhere that i need or could be. I have existed as dandelion spores, carried by God’s wishes to wherever there is a break between wind. i know now though that I am not running. i am not chasing. i am not afraid of being still. i am lonely, aching always. i miss home of stone and riverbeds, the comfort of preference and closed doors. But i understand more than i did before. So much, still, exists beyond me. There are parts of myself that i have no concept of. Colors, feelings, pleasures, forests, flavors, everything. i barely, barely exist. Yet even in my fractal reality, there are orchestras of emotion and knowings that flood every moment with sweet music, albums of Ecstasy. My body, moving, speaking, touching, breathing. Paintings of mind and olive oil. Ducks gathering for feasts in grove’s safety. i remember so much from other moments of Being, the immensity of right NOW and the limitation of my humanness, always, everything existing in everything.
i’ve been opening awareness of attraction and aversion more and more; the pulling toward and pushing away. These things don’t happen independently, they’re both somehow always happening at every level; available and unavailable simultaneously. i want to bloom into Love as deeply and widely as possible, swallow every aspect of Reality into the Love that is Itself. In this way there can be no duality, everything is absorbed beyond the minds qualifications. It is beyond polarity, beyond neutrality, given that neutrality requires a spectrum of opposites. Nothing exists but the center that it is everything, perfectly balanced and spherically complete.
i did not lose my mind this year, although i admit i did try. Better luck next year i suppose. Or tomorrow even. Or later today. When i sit, i watch my thoughts form urgent and elaborate stories about what i will wear and where i will go, about sex and what i will write about. Who i need to talk to and what i need to say. All of this is still so “real”, and yet my experience is so palpably different than it ever has been. i remember 22, not being able to walk, sleep, dream, talk without producing/planning. Ideas, ideas, ideas, my value tied to all of them. The burden of grandiosity burning holes in my notes app. “Do this or this, then that.” A prison of cerebral iconography.
i am not yet free, but i am freer than i ever have been. i am not yet excavated, but i am clearer than i was. i do not wonder where bliss resides anymore. i don’t not wonder how to get there. i do not wrestle, as i have, with an impending necessity to control my experience or make something of my life. Life is making something of me, and all the while She is teaching me to become nothing at all. i do not experience myself/mind as the Maker anymore. i’m experiencing a deeply trustful and playful dimension of reality, trying on wigs of identity and mad libbing conversations, weaving magnetically into and out of relationship to form. i am much less attachment to who i’d like to be perceived as, what i’d like to offer, what i’d like to be. Melting into just being, just offering, just receiving.
we’ve built a world of such seriousness and isolation, such speed and resistance. we have learned to fight, to own, to spiral, to oppose, to resist. These skills have value, they are vitals gifts in imagining and realizing Liberation, but they are not Liberation Itself. They are tools, but they are not the forest. we must learn again how to read the secrets of trees and fire, to Love relentlessly and as effortlessly as breathing. we must also learn how to breathe. What is the use of destruction if we have forgotten how to exist? What happens after we burn everything, if we do not know how to rest in ash?
i have stolen so much from myself and others in the grasp of separateness and the idea that value is something that “we”/the mind can give or take away. we carry with us through Life the gift and responsibility of meaning making, but that meaning is relative and fluid. It shapes our individual and collective navigation of reality so that we can learn whatever we need to. It’s a way to focus, a way to relate, a way to come closer before letting go. Equally as important to making is unmaking. Unlearning. Unassigning. Opening (infinitely) to the mysterious more and less-ness that inhabits Form as Formlessness. What i decide the call of the laughing falcon “means” cannot possibly speak of the value of the Falcon. What i decide it means about a person to lack a home, or to drive a nice car, or to be angry at their mother, cannot possibly encompass their Beinghood. Beinghood is un-encompassable, un-assignable. The work right now is to grip SO much more loosely on the value-beliefs i have gathered about myself and all Beings (there is no separation); to give Being breathing room to actually express, to change, to become and dissolve. The work is to stop trying to intellectually own mySelf, as well as to stop trying NOT to be something; to accept and forgive Being’s capacity to be everything, and to allow perception to exist without existing as perception.
i keep stoping and starting my sharing. Writing, deleting, drawing, erasing, painting, painting again. There’s so much that i could say and so much that i can’t. Sharing from the space that i’m in now feels strange and futile, not to mention fucking difficult. In many ways it feels like Annabelle barely exists. I am living through her, with her, and yet I’m losing her all the time. But in a moment she is back, in love and illusion, crying and laughing and being a person. I notice, too, the fear in sharing from this space, this void that feels endless and abundantly empty. Human anticipation and fear of perception robs me of the gifts of Truth in what feel like such a tender form. i’m practicing being in this space, communicating from this space, and Being Space Itself.
Ultimately I am so grateful to be in a body, to experience aliveness alongside birds and soil and humans. And good fucking music. This year has been such a stripping away of so much that i “had”: jobs, relationships, homes, money, belongings, roles, titles, trust, plans. So much falling away, and i could not possibly imagine feeling fuller. i feel nestled in the lap of my Mother, watched over by gardens and guided by all the animations of God. All in the letting go, all in the letting go.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
///
“I” turned 24 yesterday, a strange day of attraction and aversion. I wrote for an hour in the morning and disappeared into the mountains most of the afternoon, and as much as I’d like to say that seeking came only from a place of wanting to commune with nature on my day of birth, it also comes from a desire to outrun human desire and attachment. It’s a day that has so much mental expectation around it. It’s common to hear people say “change your perspective” or “let go” when it comes to uncomfortable thinking habits, and I’m not convinced we are as honest about the difficulty of doing such as we could be. Changing your mind is hard, really really hard. It is one thing to not act or speak on your thoughts, another not to feed them, another altogether not to have them. This is what my life has been dedicated to, what I hope it will continue to be dedicated to, although letting go of that expectation is also the work.
Everything always feels like its the most intense its ever been. I can remember other years, other moments where I was standing far enough away to appreciate the immensity. This year doesn’t feel different in that way. But I guess I feel different. I feel fuller, I feel less attached. I notice the mind’s anxiety about how others perceive me or what I am going to do to make money or spend my time or find a partner or blah blah blah. But the difference is, at least today, this week maybe, I’m noticing it more than I am it.
I’m on a plane right now after being delayed for 5 hours. An airport full of impatient and frustrated human emotion. I think in those moments it becomes easier to both become the mass and watch the mass. A child throws a tantrum and has to sit on the floor while a mother strives for damage control. An older man yells at nobody. People eat their bagels and talk to devices, sometimes to each other. We’re stuck here in this moment of suspension. I could feel the annoyance, the urgency inside of me. But I remember that I have nowhere that I actually need to be. All the conditions that I have set for my day exist solely because that’s what I expected out of my day, not because they are inherently given by reality.
I’m getting a lot more comfortable with trust and not knowing. I know I say that all the time, and that isn’t to say that when someone asks me what my plan is I don’t have a wave of anxiety and fear. I feel that, I notice my mind scheming up ideas and making to do lists. But I also notice that Reality is always happening. The deer still pause on the sunny side of the mountain to nibble grasses in community. The moss still reaches for the river. The snow still glitters. Everything still happens, even in the midst of everything we think that should be happening crumbling. I asked my grandmother recently if she was afraid of dying, and if she thought about what happens after death. She said she wasn’t afraid, that she didn’t know but that she experienced God through the beauty of everything. She was raised baptist, but doesn’t consider herself religious anymore. There’s an interesting relationship between being religious and being connected to God. We’ve created so many structures, through the mind with the mind, to understand and comprehend things. That’s the nature of it, at least in part; seeking to understand and measure. I read about God, in scriptures and poetry, but more than anything, I experience God. I’ve always been so resistant to saying that, using that word: God. I have so many mental impressions about the harm and fallacy of religious institutions, of blind faith and religious colonization. It’s been a process this year to change my relationship with that word, along with everything else. I’ve come to increasingly touch the immensity of Everything, and in turn the words our human minds use to grasp at it fall humorously short. God especially is such a heavy word. It’s been one thing to sift through my own impressions, another to sift through everyone else’s, and another thing entirely to sift through my own reactions to the reactions of others.
I’ve spent a good deal of this year meeting people again; emerging from focused isolation into worlds of 9-5’s and bar hopping. Its been so challenging, and its been so beautiful. I felt so uncomfortable when I was initially back “in the world”, and so much of me wanted to run away. I didn’t like being asked my name, where I lived, what I did, where I was from, etc.; all these questions that felt like they just highlighted my individuality and separateness, something I’d spent the last 9 months trying to overcome. It felt so painful to have my identity be pointed at, and more than that it felt painful to not get to control in what way it was pointed at. For a while there I fought so hard against “being perceived”, because nothing felt like the way I wanted to be perceived in. And what is more, all the ways I was being perceived came up against my own judgements against that “type” of person. I didn’t want to be perceived as a Yoga teacher, I didn’t want to be perceived as someone who had lived in Costa Rica. I didn’t want to be perceived as the unemployed friend, the naive vagabond, the unhinged artist, the shitty writer, the homeless traveler, etc. I would get really defensive when someone would ask me something about myself, and/or judge the person for “low level” conversation because I couldn’t be bothered to be human. I didn’t know how to respond, couldn’t respond in a way that felt good to me, so it frequently became someone else’s fault.
My mind wanted so badly to be able to offer up an identity and say “this is who I am”. There’s so much mental security and safety in being able to present ourselves to the world, our “image” or “brand” I guess is what the kids call it these days. The trouble is, the work of Yoga is to relinquish attachment to any one thing. To the mind, that’s like continuously burning your own house down because you remembered that you don’t need to live inside. Offering yourself up the fire, again and again. I’ve been trying to focus in that way, everything as an offering.
I still get embarrassed, I still get nervous, I still get judgmental and think because I refuse to collapse that I somehow know better. The mind will always try to claim some status and pride in action, even though the mind is not the Knower. I had an experience the other day where I met a man, he asked me out, and in the two hours between meeting and spending time with him, my mind proceeded to design our entire life together, including how I was going to break the news to my ex that I had fallen in love with someone new. It was like watching a reality tv show inside of my head. My mind was convinced that it knew how everything was going to play out, and because it knew how it was going to play out, there were certain things I needed to do to be prepared for the upcoming events. Now, when it finally came to spend time with this person, I had such a dramatically different experience than what my mind had predicted that it was blatantly hilarious. We, as a species perhaps, have convinced ourselves that the mind is the ultimate portal of knowing and understanding. I experience this sentiment to be not only radically untrue, but brutally imprisoning.
For a few months after my emergence, I was trapped in this idea that I knew how my life was going to end. I felt like no matter what I did, I was going to lose touch with everyone that I loved and descend only into mySelf. It felt overwhelming, like I had the choice to either fail miserably in the material world or renounce all worldly things in the search of Truth. But at that point, I wasn’t considering renunciation because that is all that I wanted in my being. I think that true, constant aching to be with God/Reality emerges only when we have cleaned the debris of the mind enough to be pierced with the abounding invitation of Sight. There are moments where all “I” want, all “I” am, is Love. There is nothing else. But, at this point, much more frequently I am thinking about back pain or what I should wear on the airplane. I’m thinking about the emails I have to answer and if my crush is going to text me back. Sometimes, I’m not thinking but I am still Annabelle. I am watching birds fly overhead and listening to the music of voices in restaurants. Other times, Annabelle is a portal, words and art flow like honey and I watch “myself” communicate something beyond the realm of mind but within the grasp of understanding. The bridge between mind and Om.
I wrote more this year than any other year of my life combined. It’s strange to read back poems from last January, a version of me that feels like a distant cousin now. I see where she’s coming from, but I don’t necessarily agree. I wrote in a lot of questions. That was the point I guess; I was tired of so many minds claiming to know what was going on. I was tired of pretending I knew what was going on. More than that, I actually wanted to know what was happening, and perhaps was convinced that if I shook the shoulders of Reality hard enough, I would find out. Now, I still stumble through the forest of Reality, but I do not feel the need to know where I am going (at least not all the time). My mind does, she is actually quite hell bent on understanding what is happening. But I am not. I am shifting, oozing perhaps, into a place of experiencing more than a place of analyzing. Someone very wise told me in June to stop trying to gather the puzzle pieces and put it all together; she told me to just pay attention to the piece I’m holding and how insanely beautiful it is. When I say beautiful, I don’t mean beauty as something that is always soft or easy or happy. Beauty is a container, alongside Love, alongside Reality. She is a holder of all things, and is contradicted by no one thing. Beauty is not shadowed by rage, nor grief nor betrayal. “I” have been increasingly intimate with suffering this year; the challenge has been to not look away or close my eyes to harm just because I wish it was different. That intimacy has brewed a bitterness inside of me, a resistance to being involved at all. Khalil Gibran’s “The Temptest” tells a story of a man who lives in the forest, in the comfort of Mother’s storm but isolated from the poisons of humanity. I read this story in October and weeped as its words reflected so much of how I felt. I feel often at odds with the way Mind/Maya has entrapped us in separation. The story ends, though, with the seeker walking back into the town, with loud disagreements and ill-intended doctors and is reminded in full force the purpose of Expansion. It is not to leave everything behind, nor to stay put in a shelter of ignorance. It is to harness the courage and equanimity to act dutifully and selflessly, to extend a hand rather than point a finger. I am trying to learn this so much right now. So much anger has been infused in my body, so much frustration and hurt and disappointment. I’m feeling the venom of that rage, and noticing too how it hasn’t done anything in any of the spaces I am a part of. My rage and judgment has created distance, not closeness. It has created more misunderstanding, not revelations of truth. It has created bondage, not liberation. I’m working to alchemize, and always will be. Anger serves to protect me, convincing me that if I become naked that I will become the things I am working to change. This is yet another trick of the mind and the mind’s attachment to identity: “I am not that”.
I hold myself back often when I write for “the public”, mostly because I don’t want to be perceived as crazy. I think that’s why poetry has felt so safe, it’s like a coded message. I’ve been working to open recently though, to be less protective of an inherently false identity and allow myself to be as fluid in personality as I feel in thought and personal perception. Also reminding myself that I am not trying to be confusing, but I’m also not trying to make sense. I’m “trying” to float effortlessly into the framework of my own mind, or anyone else’s mind for that matter. I’m “trying” not to try to do anything at all.
///
Art as love letters to God
The mind as an echo chamber; cerebral fatigue and personality limitation
A fear of being perceived, especially as crazy
Experiencing vs. analyzing
Attachment and expectation; the mind really believes its in control
A dam breaking:tantrums on the side of the road. Allowing yourself to be a child
God is Wisdom, is Love, is Truth
There is a way in, but you have to stop searching for it
Every particle of Being is making love to you. Presence as Pleasure
Are you by yourself because it is easier or because you’re really behind everything you are? The self-judgement reflected by other minds
How big can you allow yourself to be AND how big can you allow others to be?
Forgiveness within grief: let betrayal pierce you, and learn to walk again
Unconditional love + conditional relationships
Love as an entity; as a force that pervades, animates, acts, sees, touches, listens through all things. Do not limit your experience of Love by limiting where you look for it. Stop looking and start seeing.
You do not need to know all the answers: you cannot know all the answers. Keep paying attention.
How do you flinch in the face of fear?
The immensity of Nature’s embrace; you cannot possibly be alone
Comments