Past few months I’ve allowed myself to be ruled by my emotions and it’s sort of come to a head. While I write about balance and goodness and contentedness, it took 3 hours in the garden and four cigarillos with a pot of coffee to see the truth. It was shown to me that I had been acting rather submissively to the whims of another, someone I cannot control yet my own ebb and flow was marked by their activity despite believing that I was in control of my own stock. As it turns out, I have not been and I have been falling back into the same patterns of blind chase of a shadow. It took the sunshine to allow me to see. The sight of birds at the feeder through the smoke of my cigarillo and steam of the black coffee to hypnotize me enough to open up the third eye to see through illusion. Or perhaps, rather delusion.
As Kurt Cobain sang, there’s something in the way and often, that’s the self. We get in our own way in some strange subconscious attempt to find our harmony instead of letting it come to us naturally. It was hubris that led me here. Hubris that led to what I can only describe as something close to heartbreak, a trust patched up with My Little Pony plasters. The truth tastes bitter today yet at least the weather is nice.
What do we do? What do I do?
I suppose we should refer to the certainty of our own human nature and the certainty that this has happened before, will again and we can endure – I can endure. Leaves grow eternal and even the dead tree gives back to the Whole in time whether as mulch or as pulp for knowledge to be printed on.
It’s amusing to me. Deeply amusing, in fact.
It’s a fresh challenge to my philosophy yet I could feel this coming in my soul which now stings a little. It’s a cold wound in the hot flesh that sits disquietly and is so intangible that perhaps only time can repair it. There is no blame, but perhaps if there was for this situation which I find myself in, it would lay at my own feet. My feelings are my own responsibility always and that I allowed another’s to harm me, that I allowed another’s lack of feelings harm me is a deep failing. But we learn don’t we? It’s just another test.
The situation, I described to a friend was that I exposed my tender flesh to the elements and now I’m feeling sorry for myself because I caught hypothermia. It was my own choice and it was my own failing to not prepare or at least guard myself a little better: rebuild, build better walls of obsidian not jade. Yet how can we exist if we don’t lower the drawbridge? What happens when the guests inside our fortress run amuck unsupervised? Is it the walls or our lack of vigilance to blame? Certainly not the guest, they weren’t to know they offended the customs of a land they are a stranger in.
Funny how a few hours of sunshine can pour so much light on the mind as well as the body. Baths bore me so they’ll be few eureka moments there but sunshine and cigarillos seem to do the trick, at least. In the silence and sunlight we can see clearly and hear the universe. For me, it speaks: let the peace come to you, cease the seeking, it will always be right behind you out of sight.
“Nothing happens to any creature beyond its own natural endurance. Another has the same experience as you: either through failure to recognize what has happened to him, or in a display of courage, he remains calm and untroubled. Strange, then, that ignorance and pretension should be stronger than wisdom.” – Meditations 5.18
Z3N0 