"Every life is a pile of good things and bad things. The good things don’t always soften the bad things — but vice versa — the bad things don’t necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant." -Doctor Who

She was creative and joyful and spontaneous, stuck in a dead-end job and slowly, ever so slowly bleeding out  and losing her capacity for love. She was tired, oh-so tired of feeling tired. And on March 27th, she woke up in the morning and decided... she would change her life. She was going to change her life. Her life was going to change.

Going through the "Dark Night of the Soul"

I will follow you into the dark...
Trying to reclaim joy in my life

"You are meant to arrive at a place of conceptual meaninglessness"




The sun has set
and yet I,
trudge on, hoping to sight a ray on the next horizon

Maybe this one feels differently because I feel differently about it.
I can't take this stuff lightly anymore... tangling people in my web of deception and mystery, using them to validate the things I forget about myself.

The thing is, I really don't want to do this anymore. Live my life like this, that is. I want something different. I need a change of scenery, I swift kick in the ass to wake me up and put me on the edge. I work best in challenging conditions. Or do I? Is that another false idea that I feed myself about who I am?

I'm sick of all these people that "know" me. I want to craft myself from nothing, raise myself from the dead. I'm done with this carcass, I want another one. I want another name, another profession, another accent, another story. I'm just another shapeshifter without a soul - nobody knows my true form except him. Sounds crazy, but there's something in me that he sees, some raw nugget of something. I want to be that person. 

There's some goodness in me somewhere... but is this my way of shifting responsibility again? Is this another way of handing the control off to someone else? He's my backboard though, my ground zero, my HQ. Is he though? Is he just another person with expectations? Does he know what he loves? Does he know my truths?
Does he know that I'm broken? Or does he know that brokenness is where the light gets in?

uncertain haikus for an uncertain time

The mind, uncertain,

Lingers above the fray - Go.

Give yourself a chance

What does it mean to?

What does it mean when you don’t?

Why waste time? Just do.

In hesitation,

there is a moment of love,

follow it. it knows.

Make no mistake about it - enlightenment is a destructive process. It has nothing to do with becoming better or being happier. Enlightenment is the crumbling away of untruth. It's seeing through the facade of pretense. It's the complete eradication of everything we imagined to be true. -Adyashanti

we cling to these former selves

These previous iterations and ideals, trying to form a definitive character in an impermanent world.

We are bound to these characters by other people, and by ourselves. In making the Self easy to digest, compact, succinct, we smooth out our ragged edges into a smooth, presentable, unnatural whole. This is not the truth of the Self. This is a persona we create and choose to uplift. We allow others to mold us to their expectation and we choose to embody their ideals of who we are.

The snake sheds his skin, discards it and disappears

We leave behind us what we no longer need, - imagine the pain if you clung to your former skins, the burden as you dragged your past behind you. This defies the natural order of the world. We cannot fight the forces greater than us, so surrender to the change.

Don’t choose to be predictable. Don’t choose to be understandable. There is loneliness, yes, in being misunderstood. But better to be alone in the truth than surrounded in a lie.

Choose to surprise people. To be unconventional. To defy expectation and test the limits of your character. Push forward. Forge a path. Light the way.

There’s nothing to speak, there’s nothing to say..

Somewhere along the line, my sunshine was taken away..

But that in itself is a lie. My life is mine, and sometimes we shut our eyes to the truth - ignoring the proof that there is something beyond us, a love that ties us together

The mind is 

All about what I say and how I act?

How about what I attract?

What do I breathe in? What goes on inside? What force do I trust to guide me?

How can I change the way I react so that it detracts from the negativity, a relative concept that I create to soothe the lack of love I feel. Another hand to God to save me, another post in hope it’ll save me from myself, another self hating self. 

There’s a wealth around us, just settle down and tap in.. it all begins from within. 

I don't want to start
I don't want to begin
I don't want to conform
I don't want to fit in
I don't want to be dead
Though in vain, I will try
To do anything that will make me feel alive

I don't like to start like this - just jumping in, running, splashing the day about in bits and pieces.. I want clarity, serenity like glass, a ceiling to break, a moment to take the time to make sure the words rhyme...

   How does one move forward? What thoughts motivate the lift of the feet, the click of the hand to decide how to translate what's inside you? Another law to abide to when you wake, you mistake that happiness is a normal thing to fake..

and then you wonder, how am I to live the world? My intentions are pure if I get something out of it. There'll be enough money to make me proud of it.

And then suddenly I couldn't write anymore.

The idea of a clean blank page wasn't an opportunity anymore, it was emptiness that needed to be filled. I was money-crazed. I am money-crazed. "How do I make money with this?" "How do I turn my passions into a career?" "How do I monetize my dreams?" Every desire, every hope was coupled with financial realism, qualified by efficiency. If it probably couldn't make me any money, I didn't do it. If the method wasn't time-efficient, I didn't do it. Friends? Fun? Pleasure? What did these words mean anymore? I was tuned in to the reality, and became more aware and subsequently, more controlling.

And as I became more controlling, I fell more into despair. I spent the prime of my early 20's - the times where it doesn't matter if it matters - living in my parents home, unable to stay out too late (my curfew was around 11, though I broke it regularly), unable to dress too risque, unable to speak the way I wanted, or live the way I wanted. Ages 20-23, the time of late sleepless nights and house parties and drugs and liver destruction. I couldn't even crash at friends houses because I wasn't allowed. I always had to drive home. I gotta say, that led to a lot of dangerous drives home.

The thing is, I spent so long longing for a certain kind of experience that now, with the freedom to do so, I'm not sure what I want. I don't know how to define myself, I don't know which character I am in the books I read. I don't have any plan. I am, I am, I am.

wonky

Breathe again.

Mondays.

Yesterday we connected again for the first time in what felt like a long time.  I saw him again, really looking at him, really talking to him -and fell in love all over. He’s so vibrant and thoughtful, funny and clever. These pedestrian words do nothing to illustrate the feeling of gasping for breath when he makes me laugh, or the warmth of his arms around me. 

My writing muscles are rusty

Rusty from disuse

Negligence abuse

The king returns to find his throne dusty

Absence uncovers truth

mouth wide shut

I can't open my mouth
for fear that the truth will come out
of me, an acrid mixture of hope and desperation
surging forth from a discontent soul

Sometimes there's nothing more to be said,
a phrase that fills me with dread -
"it is what it is"
the stopper to opportunity, ambition to bed.

It's hard to keep at it, stick to it, get through it.
It's hard to go for it, reach for it, work for it.
So many choices to be made.
And yet in the end there's just one: to do or not do. That is the question. Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing, end them.

d2

The say working for it is the dream. What am I even working for right now? I’m not even really enjoying the journey. How can you, when everyone is unhappy too? 

new

Stop. Breathe.

A new year.

It’s so easy to get sucked into things, swept into the current of what you believe is the reality of your life - work, eat, sleep, repeat the cycle again until one day you actually wake up from that sleep and realize you’re living in a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream of awareness, that fantasy is accompanied by a muddled clarity that spins you into the believing that you were awake all along. 

How can awareness be so obsolete? A life replete with the ability for fullness requires emptiness to begin. 

So empty. Empty yourself. Empty yourself of all expectations and prejudices and desires. Is it good to let go of desire? How do you achieve anything, goals or success? How do you envision the outcome you desire if you rid yourself of it?

_____

Upon further reading, the idea is not to get rid of all desire, but selfish desire. The NEED for something vs a goal I wish to achieve. Seems there is a strong misconception between the two.