In 6 days, I will have been home for 3 months and it feels like I never left. The way we reintegrate back into our old lives or normal life, is interesting to me. Maybe I shouldn’t use the words “normal life”, it makes it feel like this is my reference point for living and there should be no reference point for a life. How does one stay open and unattached with a reference point as to what is standard. How does one stay willing to be present and follow the course of a life if it keeps going back, back in general, back to a reference point. I admire those who do not carry a reference point for their life and let themselves drift about the moment. I do at times, but it feels there are a fair number of moments where I live in too much fear to be that present.
Like the job offer in the Grand Tetons, I was too attached to fear to take it. Being offered a job to paint in a National Park for a private company, live out of my van in the park, ride, hike, kayak on my days off. It sounds magical to me; oh I love the idea of it. All that splendor for $15.50 an hour, $15.50 an hour. After living expenses there is very little money left over to start again somewhere else when the season ends.
I guess there is a compromise there, live a dream but do so with complete abandonment of a secure future and the crazy thing is, there is no secure future no matter how much money I make or vegetables I eat. Will money and vegetables make life a little less arduous, yes, but will it give me security and safety, no. True security is non-existent, it’s just a way to control my fear of the unknown… It’s fascinating how well we reintegrate into our former lives and old ways of thinking.
It’s February 2nd and I am already thinking about if I will have work in March, my phone has rung very little due to business choices I made over the last couple years. I cared not so much about growing the business then and acquiring new clients, I mainly focused in on two jobs during that time. I lost my attachment to everything back then, unattached to my future, to money, to my blankets and pillows, to my cozy apartment. I had the freedom from the obsession of self and didn’t fear the future, it was beautiful. I was not only welcoming change with open arms and dreamy eyes, I sought it. And the dreams kept coming, the possibilities seemed endless and I felt as if I was 20something again.
Remember being 20, 22, 25? Remember the freedom and complete abandonment of fear of the future. Life was all inspiring, even when I was on drugs. Yes, the future was bleak and I never thought I would ever be able to get clean but still there was possibility in my life and the future was not sitting in my lap as is does today at times. With age comes wisdom but so does the reality of living and the pains of living. At 20 I knew almost no one with cancer or heart disease or COPD. I knew no one who had lost everything and was struggling to make ends meet or had nothing to begin with and struggling to makes ends meet. There was so much less knowledge and so much more wisdom in of the moment. I felt indestructible and that I would live forever.
Maybe it’s my lack of acceptance that spins these circles in my gut and creates that haphazard bird’s nest of my brain. I know not how people go day in and day out with sedimentary lives, lives without a soulful purpose. Maybe it’s stability I seek yet fear it at the same time. For someone that works so hard at walking the middle path I sure do swing from left to right a lot. I wonder if others do, if other people out there bounce around inside their head and heart with a feeling of something missing, an incompleteness in them.
Truth is I should probly be locked away somewhere, strung up and out on pills. I should be drunk and disorderly in shit bars that smell of piss and stale beer. I should be stoned on my couch with cotton mouth and Cheeto dust on my fingers. Wandering downtown streets in the warm glow of street lamps and neon signs. I should be in crappy, dirty out of the way bargain hotel rooms, eating greasy cheeseburgers, and fries covered in salt and ketchup. I should be on a Greyhound bus traveling to Florida where the streets are whitewashed from the rain and the sun and life is slower. I should be running my fingers through golden wheat that sways in the breeze as I walk into an endless field of gold. I should be sleeping with hookers and cutting my heart on desire, pining away for the love of all the woman incapable of giving it to me. I should be in New York, I should be in Venice, I should be anywhere but here, present and wide eyed watching my life wither away from the second story of hell.
I was never meant for good. I’m good at it and that’s only cause ego controls those actions. Maybe my desire does too, the desire to be absolved of all the bad I have done over the 100’s of lifetimes I have lived. To be forgiven for the betrayal and broken hearts I given, for the lies and self-centered actions of a scared kid who never felt comfortable in his own skin. I prostrate to god with every action of kindness and forgiveness, with every donation and turning of the cheek. Thinking somehow all this good that I try and do will bring forth the fortune of happiness and peace within. I sit at the altar, light the candles, burn the incense, recite the prayers – all to be well in my little bird brain which is too complicated to understand simple directions.
I pick away at self, berate, belittle, all of this when no one is watching. I judge not you but only myself, unable to cast anger at anyone for very long, always looking back at me and who I have been. It’s a constant battle, maybe not every hour or every day, but there is always a fight to be had with self when I look for one. Constantly plagued with the nagging feeling that I was meant to be more, to do more, to give more, but never having the internal belief or fortitude to do anything with it…
I want to be still, my mind to be quiet and content. I had a dream last night that the ringing in my ears that has been constant for 5 years now due to a mountain biking accident, that this ringing was so loud it drowned out all the voices, all the thoughts and I could actually sleep.
As you know God wakes me at 3:30 most nights, to drop in and say hello, he is silly that way. There are many theories for why one wakes in the middle of the night, my favorite is God is visiting. He, it, she – whatever you want to label it as, it wakes me, shakes me from a restless slumber and watches how I react. Maybe sleep is overrated or maybe crazy does not sleep. Maybe its nerves or stress or a pattern I fall into. Whichever, whatever, I’ve plenty of time to think, to mull over my life and the decision to make decisions.
And it’s now, this very moment of rereading and rewriting and adjusting to the moment, that I find beauty and happiness.
Not in me alone, but in now, these very minutes, this time when time does not exist and there is no past or future, just seeing who I am and what I’ve become. I get lost in these moments, these moments of pure bliss. Acknowledging my presences in the world, my bird’s nest of a brain, spending time with my daughter, traversing trails, kissing a woman and having the earth fall from beneath my feet when I do so. Where life begins to be poetic again, when the shell around self is cracked and I can see the bigger picture, the one that has no reflection of me in it. As I sip my coffee and feel the heat from the fire that sits across the room from me, finding gratitude for having a place to lay my head…
I guess I really just want to feel something, anything really. Be it pleasure or pain, I just want to feel. I want to be alive and know that I am living and not just working and slaving for a future not promised. Death sit’s right around the corner, closer than I know and although I don’t fear it, I fear not living more before it comes for me. This is what has always propelled me to go, to seek, to risk security and safety. Whether it looks as if I am running from death or running to it at times, I care not to be stagnant, I care not to be the greys of the world, the dull hum of a refrigerator, the flickering light unable to burn.
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