(no subject)

[dchenes]

There are days when just breathing is enough of an accomplishment to satisfy me. Those seem to be the days when I go to work and everybody wants everything NOW, and it all feels completely superfluous.


When I meditate, which I haven't been doing much of lately, I use two lines of a mantra written by a samurai in (I think) the 16th century. "I have no life or death: I make the tides of breathing my life and death." Someday if I get around to it, I'll post the entire mantra. I have it stuck to the side of one of my desk shelves at work.

I wish I knew what I wanted. Well, I know what I want, I'm just not sure (a) how to get it and (b) if getting it is a good idea. What I want basically is to stop thinking. I want to stop thinking about grad school and money and life and work and all that stuff, and spend a good chunk of time thinking about who I am and where I'm going and how I can stop going there. I don't like where I'm going. The problem is that it will take at least a couple of days for me to stop thinking about the things I want to ignore for a while, and I don't have a couple of days to do that with. It's the sort of thing I would do if I were on vacation, but I can't wait until August to do it.

There are times when a quick fix won't do. I've been patching up my brain for a long time now, and if it were mechanical, it would be festooned with rope and cable and patches and temporary switches and dials and I'd be down to trying to fix it with chewing gum and string. I should strip it down to basics and fix it for real, and if that means going out into the middle of nowhere and yelling at rocks because I can't yell at people, so be it. There are definitely people I want to yell at. There are also people I want to cry on, and people I want to tell things I can't express in words, and people I want to just sit there and listen to. And I can't, because I have to keep being a rational, useful, productive human being. Screw that.
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Comments

[enochs-fable.livejournal.com]

I'd love to hear the rest of that mantra.

I know the place you're in, I've visited it often these days - too often for my taste. If it's any consolation, you're far from alone in this.

We're always around if you need someone to bounce things off of. As long as those things aren't rocks.

A poem that has been often in my mind as the spring blooms around us:

"THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS"
by Wendell Berry
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.