This morning a man skipped out in front of me, where I was sitting in my vehicle. I watched as he went on his merry-way. I thought that is joyful to see such glee; a man become little child free. And then his trousers, too loose, slipped down to expose a buttocks covered end to end in huge red boils. I didn’t know what to think then.

I feel a dreamer awoken from a dream she thought she’d understood.

I keep visualizing this huge bubble, a vast space encompassing the whole of my world. And I have floated up, much like a giant balloon, air-filled and light to touch, with open palms penetrating the top of the bubble. At least what appears to be the top. I look down to see the everything that was. I look up to see the everything beyond. I linger, my hands pressing.

Today I awoke with great angst. I feel emptied of much of what I used to be, but still entirely me in my making. I have this great capacity for bliss, and then, in turn, the greater degree for pain. I can delve into the pain so thick and rich, it is almost like a buttery-sugar sauce poured on grandest dessert; only it hurts, and burns, and penetrates a part I knew not existed.

I know things; and I hesitate to tell, because all these rules of telling circulate in my mind. My heart knows, but she sleeps when the mind is awake. And when heart awakes, the mind seems so distant and unconcerned. There is a balancing I find difficult, almost unmanageable. How to be me and not to be me. How to be in this pain-body ripe with thought and idea, and still recognize my ideas are nothing. I am only an assumption, an accumulation, a dream herself: a dreamer that is the dream, the dream that is the dreamer.

I don’t like this in between place; how I can feel so entirely divine and one with All and then shift back to this emptiness that ponders the empty beyond empty. I don’t like the pain of discipline. The pain of experiencing the now. The pain of avoiding the fear and agony. But equally in degree, is the turbulence of letting the thoughts enter. I be either gatekeeper in mental pain controlling the switchboard or vastly unburdened and free in my tormenting fear. I have no other way to be. Unless in bliss or in the spell of hearing the lessons—but even that must end.

The lessons fill me entirely. I hear the truth, or what appears the truth, over and over, in these huge gigantic sweepings of knowing. But then heart knows not what to do. How to be. How to share. Or if to shut her mouth and dare not speak. For I recognize my insignificance.

Still I be this mind, and still I be this body. I feel more phantom than ever, wandering about and wishing for the same limbs and eyes; so at least all else, the people and forlorn view, still seemed to witness same. Instead all seems a strange land, and I a strange woman undone and brought forward into the nothing.

I am spectator now. Victim before. Victim no more except onto myself.

And here the responsibility comes: the demon thoughts of how to be no longer and yet to be. The rules enter, as before, but now at different levels: the ways of this new found world.

Such intensity, such newness, such wonderment, that I grow speechless in my speech. And still there is this pulse, this heart, this want to be. Who am I that can breathe and feel, but still see beyond what is?

I am imploded in sadness here within the making of rules; watching the dictator fear slip through as guise of the rules of how to be outside the rules. There are layers upon layers of rigidness, in which I slice; yet, upon slicing, the other boundary emerges, two-fold, gigantic in appearance, a big-brother to the last, the roar ferocious, with a truth so unbearable in its light that I know not whether to glide into and drink or run away in terror.

I have slayed the master of you—the one I put upon throne and made my judge and personhood. But now I must face the jury—the many pawns I be, scurrying about as if to not fall off the checkered board. And still they fall, one by one, into some abyss. And still I be.

It is mind-boggling and dangerous, and I know not how to stop and how to proceed. I cry out for direction and there is always the knowing, the answer, the gift of love and understanding. But even this has become like too much sugar, too much goodness, too much to see in a place of such blindness.

I can write, and then open book of one form, and find what I have written. I can see, and then awake from the seeing, and turn to see the happening. Sometimes the time seems to be naught, and the naught seems to be wrapped in multiple-parallel happenings. What was there becomes not there, and what was not there, becomes there. I can’t understand it, nor do I try, but still it comes.

At moments I feel forlorn and un-chosen by my own self, granted much with no basket for carrying and no foundation for relief.

I can’t be this or that. So I must be nothing. But there is no guidebook for nothing. For even latching onto nothing is latching onto something. There are vast contradictions and complexities; the very uncertainty itself as truth. I see, but to tell another I see is at once defaming my own seeing. Announcing I am something in the mere wanting to share the thought of nothing.

Before I allowed myself to be judged and formed and reformed. I was still a part. I was the puppet in a play. I belonged even in my thoughts of un-belonging. Now I don’t even un-belong.

Yesterday, I felt the spike of isolation. In my new finding of naught, I allowed myself to venture on a walk around the lake. I took in the nature; I took in the guiding voice; I took in the pulsing love; I saw about me beauty. I tried, in this state to reach out, but I remained entirely invisible. The harder I smiled, the more I tried to be seen, the less I was seen. Each passerby, say one, paid passing glance, and many frowned. I couldn’t penetrate whatever I was in. I couldn’t be witnessed. I couldn’t be formed. I couldn’t be made into another’s thought and interpretation. I was nothing I could see, and none that could see me. I was lost in my own finding of nothing.

I became attached to the un-attachment. I became attached to the bliss of not being, and in so doing, became the misery of aloneness.

And so this morning, I wept deeply inside. I woke up not knowing how to be in a world so undone to me, inside a woman so invisible.

Again, I walked the same path; now the sun had been dismissed and the clouds awoke the gulls. The birds sang overhead and I cried in silence below. I wore a black hood, a black jacket, dark trousers, and a gloomy expression. The tears welled up. But still I walked. And this time people saw me; they made effort to smile. They made effort to say hello. They waved. They saw my pain and in my pain could be.

And so I am left in wonderment of how to walk in this world. Shall I be the merrymaker unseen and isolated in a world of games? Or shall I be the miserable one embraced with open arms by the invisible phantoms I long to call home?

And what of the space in between?