Emptiness - Part I

Saturday 6/20/09

As said in an earlier posting, I hesitate posting personal pieces when I don’t deem them to have potential value to others, for reasons I won’t reiterate. Now a step further in my reluctance, I transcribed a longhand piece which, upon re-reading, seems disjointed in places and missing some thought completions. Yet I dare not clean it up as, experience has shown, I’ll sanitize and intellectualize the hell out of it which then removes it from the experience I was having when I was writing it. In the future, I imagine I’ll endeavor to be clearer as I write, knowing I may post it and wanting the user, or even myself three months hence, to get me. So here goes:

I haven’t done much when I’m home, including improving – fixing – or cleaning up the place, let alone anything on my to-do list. And rarely writing. I feel tired a lot. I look at the cleanse programs like Mark’s and want to do them but don’t feel motivated to get started or build the structure to maintain it.

My first reaction is to want to jazz myself up on something, to get excited and hopeful, to imagine I’m going to extricate myself from this malaise and accomplish great things and be happy. What if, instead, I just stayed with the feeling, surrendering to it?

Hmmm. As I sit with it, I realize it’s this state that I escape from, mostly with television, sometimes with the doing of other people’s agenda – e.g. my job – it’s the state of me, me without manufactured hoopla, a sense of emptiness. Now it also has a tiredness which feels like I’m sinking.

I’m feeling so weak and hopeless that I only feel little sparks when new girls walk in here. I see the illusory agenda of my attraction fairly quickly and hence let go.

Yes I do need the colon cleanse, just as I need my exercise – as it’s fundamental to my health. Yet I must not link my hopes to it. Sure I’ll look a little better and feel better, maybe less tired, less cloudy. I imagine, in that case, that I’ll feel a calm, more even-keeled emptiness – all things being equal.

The emptiness requires its own attention. On the one hand, nothing is required: it can just be. For a while anyway. If only to retrain myself to stop running from it, cramming it with sweets, television, lust bursts, and fantasies of the future – and staying up late.

It’s like I was left with it a long time ago and just wouldn’t abide by it, so I would fill it – mostly with crap – at every turn. And when I couldn’t avoid it, I would project it onto a circumstance – e.g. someone “abandoning” me.

As I imagine myself staying with this state, it’s almost a relief – nothing to do, nowhere to go, nobody to please or impress. As I catch someone looking at me, I have no desire to judge them or shift my composure, which is what I usually do. To quote Popeye, “I am that I am and that’s all that I am.”

So there is a centeredness, a groundedness, in this state. I want to take stock in that. They are powers. Yet I also wonder what can enter, fill it even, because I would find the adhedonic aspect intolerable eventually.

But maybe this emptiness is where I would reach if I consciously, intentionally, emptied my vessel, emptying which is generally done in practices in order to let good stuff in, in order to be filled.

So then I need the roadmap. That is, how do I intentionally empty, then, when it feels right, fill.

It’s the filling myself with junk, the running that has been my fundamental dishonesty, my fraudulence all these years. M got that one right when she said I seek sensation wherever I can get it. I only wish she held me with compassion, rather than dumping me for it. I won’t posit her as more evolved than me. She had her stuff. Yet I don’t want to user her hypocrisy – of her dismissing me because I was flawed when she was also flawed – to discount her wisdom, her parting gift.

It was her framing and her abandonment that has helped me to finally see how desperate to fill myself, to not be in the emptiness, I’ve been. I’ve twisted, turned, pleading to her representation in my head as to why she ruined a potentially perfect union, when my confusion has been in expecting someone else can keep me sustained in a perfect state, a fullness.

Short of grace and enlightenment, I now realize I will not experience permanent nourishing fullness and perhaps – I’m trying to take in – nor do I need to. I would though like to believe I can learn to be accepting of my emptiness when it comes, to greet it, to love it even, and then learn to see and invite in the nourishing things that might fill it.