meditations on doubt and becoming

Every interaction labeled as abandonment
I feel like every version of myself
I have ever been

Something is dying inside; the need for validation.
The need to impress, to prove,
To improve, to move
beyond ordinary into wonder in the eyes of another.
I long for wonder in my own eyes, I seek a different gaze.
I seek no gaze, outside myself.
I feel no need to use words of persuasion,
there is no burning fire inside, heating the coals,
creating energy to pursue the distant race I am used to running.

It seems I have so much to say but no use for words. There are necessary words, and then there are words that mean nothing. Most words are this kind. I spoke to Dan, trying to describe to him my recent, and unfamiliar, bouts of anxiety—fear that seems truly unwarranted, but not unmanageable—and in all my blabbering I found, to my surprise, that all I really needed was a hug. Talking sometimes does little to bring what so many of us desire, which is consolation, rather than resolution. I am already resolved to my anxiety, my grief—my moods—but I am not held in them, apart from a warm bed, and soft sheets, but sometimes we just want to feel cared for. To be looked at and met in our own suffering, rather than simply verbally acknowledged. It is true, talking does so little for me these days, even my written words are confused. Here I am writing. Here I am, still not sure of the story I am telling, full of the feeling that my life, my being, stretches beyond these words and pages. But that is reality; everything, sometimes, will fall short; like a moment of ecstasy, we find ourselves empty by contrast on the other side. When my words are constructed for others they are inherently lifeless. I know no other like I know myself. The only life I can give is my own. I must find resolve that a word of mine may never be read by another. But I am in a labour of love

only devoted to my Self. It is not to get at the material, it is necessarily a spiritual endeavor of devotion; “out of the eternal back and forth of pleasure and despair.” Aim for joy, I keep saying, and what I really mean is to aim to feel full of life that induces deep repose. Aim to find clarifying vision. I can neither create, control, or determine the experience of another, all I can do is try to unshackle expression from the surface-level distractions that infiltrate the message. Truth is found in deep, soulful understanding, elucidation, epiphany, not in the war of the senses. The senses merely guide, but they ripple the glass-like surface. They open the door, but internal cultivation guides the stream of life and molds it. Something unknown to me chews it up and spits it back out, once again needing a clearly paved road to reach translation, back out through motor movement and sensual caress. So much of the original gets lost along the way, and that is the virtue of art as piety, as the ritual practice; it is opening up, expanding, refining the limestone caves that the river of the expression must travel. "You” are what gets in the way.

It is a labour of love,

I am only devoted.

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Read the diaries here.