being

421: The Center

| Aspergers Girls

“I trust and accept where I am in this moment. I refuse to be my own judge and jury. I love me in all of my emotions. I respect my journey and trust in my own inner strength. I believe in a purpose, a power and a guiding light within and beyond me. I am enough. We are enough. And in both my joy and in my sadness, I shall choose to shine. Not hoping for a better future or to resurface my current existence; but surrendering to the process, while moving through the seasons, within and about these cyclic moments of rebirth; a willing presence to be that both ripens me into the fullness of now and forges a grand adoration of self and all.” ~ Sam

bridge

I am a bit confused. I have been visualizing a diagram in my mind, similar to the cardinal directions of the compass: the compass points of north, south, east, and west. On the right I see obsession, on the left fixation, to the top the future, down the bottom the past. In the center is a circle, indicating the present.

Where in I spent much of my life in one direction or another, now I am practicing living in the center circle. Here is my refuge. Only I don’t know what to think about.

I find what seems to be relief in glimpsing the future of hope; but I know too well even glimpses of the future eventually cause me grief. A suffering of sorts. I find what seems to be release in sparring with the past; yet, I know too, the past is done now, and often is marred in my own disillusion of reality.

I used to naturally, almost instinctually, grasp onto a project or special interest, and here I would leap into a state of retreat. The world around me seemingly vanishing as I rose into a protective cloud of focus and revenue, reaping the sum of the parts I had envisioned in mind, and watching as the product of my creation came to life.

I used to unwillingly dance in the cyclic burden of obsessive thought, tiring myself up much within the first hours of the day with either wishful thinking or dreaded fear of illness and death. Now, this too has simmered in my mind. The tragic demise of self tango I forged through daily, hour upon hour, and wrapped myself in, with ribbons of torture, is missed. Not missed for the pain and agony I felt in doing this to self, but for the routine, the normalcy I created for escape.

The dreaming of the ways it could be and what could be, who could be—there I still slip into the easiest—a psychological and spiritual combination of desire, want, lust, love and yearning all tied into the knot of future that shall not be.

I am searching, without actively searching, for a way to be that requires nothing but the center moment.

A journey that is absent of requiring, in essence, and fills me with completion of self. However, I live in a world of constant wants and needs and unfulfilled dreams. Everywhere I look, everywhere I travel, is a someone reaching or inquiring, searching or instigating. People planning, constantly, for the next moment. People reliving, continually, the past hauntings of life they seem to think are real. And all around I am surrounded by this wild charge of inhabitants who are grasping my hand in an attempt to connect; whilst all about I feel entirely alone and isolated.

There is this burning longing in me, so tender, and at the same time so ravenous in its want, that destruction seems inevitable. I have this glow within that aches and burns and turns me to the direction of naught, repeatedly; this growing passionate flame I want someone to see, to hold, to recognize, to soothe. And still, there is no one.

This is an isolation new to me. A finding of self and of purpose, and a recognition of love of being singularly countered with the unyielding desire to be joined as no longer one.

I think of the moments. Of how to live in the moment, without wandering in any direction.

Though, I do wander.

In so doing, I recognize my humanness again and again. Something that is neither a frailty nor curse. Something that simply is. I recognize my confusion equally. Struggling in the freedom of travel. In the choices of now. In the ache of deep carved out awareness. And as I struggle with the need to connect, I also struggle with the need to protect, to hide in a delicate corner and retreat into self for rescue and reprieve. I hover in this in between space of wanting to reach out and find the connective bridge of recognition and longing to remain untouched and unmoved.

Each encounter in which I am present, I am equally vulnerable and exposed. In some ways, I feel as if a boulder is momentarily slid across to expose the cavernous depths of self. And in so being exposed, I am excavated and explored and evaluated. Then, without effort the boulder is placed back. And upon my return to being, I am neither beneath in the unseen dark nor above observing the gigantic barrier. I am equally not the boulder itself. I am nothing.

I am this searching that doesn’t search. I am this wandering that doesn’t wander. Like the circulating air I feel. Only with a voice that whispers: Find me. Hold me. Love me.

And I am left in the center. In the circle of creation, waiting for the bell to chime. To ring of both completion and beginning. To signal my unification with all and bring me to the someone with open arms who in my presence alone is home.

***
After reading this I was led back to this post: Day forty-two: On Leadership. The words helped greatly to ease my mind. ❤

The introduction to this youtube is wonderful as well.

306: Seams, I Am

| Aspergers Girls

Who am I, this mystery before me, both below and outward, both inside and beneath reason?

Who am I, this single dancer in a circus line of creatures mistaken as self, whilst all about this singular is nowhere?

Who am I, this bewildered child screaming out of the darkness, whilst light is everywhere, immersing my doubt in the seeded-bed of nutriment.

Am I but my shadow, the edges of me formed by the objective angle, by the instrumental being of sun at play with madness?

Am I but marionette set to strings or the more: this twisted master puppeteer snarling and snapping from up above, laughing at the ownership of chance?

Am I the singer tethered inside shell, severed voice blocked and thusly returned by thine own harbored walls?

Am I this rice, this grain, this planted web, tangled beneath the soil of enrichment, begging within a beating substance to escape the depths from where breath labors?

Am I a blinded legless one, slithering through the streets of reason, slipping through skin in regeneration, hoping passerby will collect the shed of what’s been?

Am I the monk with cymbals, clanging-metal-smile-creator, discontented-sorrow-seeker placating the rebel masses, born into appeasement?

Am I the voice without time, the rhythm without cause, the ocean without water, the mountain without foundation? Am I merely floating in a nonsensical nonexistence, wading and wavering through that which is naught and cannot be found?

Am I dropped here, a foreigner, with all the ripened senses plucked out of me, so I may spend eternity searching for the one I once was?

Helpless at my very seams, I am.

The most of all not mended, not fixed, not finished, left to wander with the stuffing jumping outside into teasing freedom, my insides deserting captain, torn empty, this incomplete form.

I am this.

I am this universal measure in incompletion, steadying myself on untrained legs in an untrained world. Jumping through hoops that neither exist or appear, but manage to bruise the very essence from where I gather semblance and substance and order.

Hollowed I am, in the shape of the corner of the mind, bleached by the external force of unknown, blanched and then blanketed in a knowing of unknowing, taught of the presence of presence, and moment within moment, but then tortured by the possibilities that endlessly speak of nowhere.

I am this vulture starved of the carrion, starved of the self, starved of what would be me inside the mirror, if image appeared. And yet I am meant to be in some way here, as if here was evermore spoken.

And thusly I clamber and shake, my own boots too big for the climbing, my own answers too heavy to be held in the limited chambers of thought’s engine.

And I trumpet, one part bleeding out to the other parts, to prove a lingering hypothesis of ever expansion. Until the weariness speaks louder than the want. Until release beckons like the child’s grave that speaks out to broken mother. Unbendable matters beckoning forth from somewhere bleak but lacking bleakness, formed of unspoken words and erased images that never were.

Here is where the artist’s invisible and imagined heart is purged, here in the incremental sewing of the energetic threads of the absence of self.

Here I exist: as the pudding poured out from the sharpening of nothing.

~~~
Samantha Craft, January 2013