isolation

407: The Echo

| Aspergers Girls

“Don’t tell me to smile. Don’t tell me to be happy. Don’t tell me what thoughts I should have and what thoughts I should not have. Don’t give me a list of ten ways to be better, to know better, to live better. Don’t point me to the right or left. To the star or to the saint. Just love me. Better yet, love yourself. All I need is a heart, eyes that are awake, and a place to rest the ways of the world that are not me. I am not taken in by who I am supposed to be in someone else’s eyes. I am taken in by the beauty that is me. I am already everything and All. If everyone could see they are too, there would be nothing of truths to tell.” ~ Everyday Aspergers

The Echo

A me that slips behind the scene knew this would be…

He watches with calm interest as I make my way down the river, less driftwood than pioneer on a raft with beating paddle.

I can see him, this undone one of none, the way he stands back and lets me be, watches as this illusioned I meanders from this truth to another; his kindly grin in the bleakest moments of darkness; his hands strong.

A cradle awaits.

Still this determination that bleeds out righteousness.

This will momentarily unbearable in its strength and stellar.

A hankering, this lingering, this potent folly of not being able to shake self from self.

To describe would do injustice, and to not describe would cause further agonizing despair.

For how to tell what I am, through I am, seems to produce jeopardy—two battled two, then four, and then more.

Swordsmen swift, many in count, each timber for the maker, each wood to be chopped, each, once tree, now distant edges merging into their own shadow.

A labyrinth of the huntsman, the hunter and the hunted same;

Each a mirror staring down a mirror, and each unnerved and brought up for game.

I is sliced and rendered empty.

Slaughtered and sacrificed.

And still this ever present, ever changing presence remains.

The one cannot help but think I am illusion.

How could I be anything else?

And even illusion, being something, is transformed into the thought of nothing, by the floating mind that reasons further in invisible plundering.

To move in such a distinct rhythm of naught.

Being here, then being gone, then being here much changed.

Tinkering toys of this world, and smile, the child’s smile— teeth wide and unburdened, stomach growing, fed upon canary two-fold.

To eat away at this place I thinks I is.

To eat away at what I think be sight.

To make morsel out of fantasy.

To understand the doctrines inside the explicit words of absence.

And bite into the existence of others’ thoughts, when their thoughts are built upon the ponds of nothing.

How and where to find the start of truth is ceasing to appear explicitly lost before found.

The maker dead before rendering wholeness.

The absoluteness evaporated before finalized.

All these trumpeting warriors blended into the background of reclaiming selves before first step is made on a path where footsteps are not held.

A witness to the soldiers before these carved eyes, in their bleakness and plight, screaming out for the way that never comes, through shadows of soul-bled sorrow.

How can so many exist and still further emerge, and where do they walk if not upon some very beating spirit?

I know not what I do or who I am, and this is insignificant compared to the ghosts I watch, to the empty places I thought were one, to the solidness dissipating, and to the rules clinging to the mass of nothing, as choking vine.

Only to be dismissed by the thousand witnesses birthed.

Still she comes, this form, this lost victimless one of none.

For no victim remains when foe is banished.

Yet, she cries holding the thousands of deaths in full arms, the one after the other burdened and unquenchable.

The captain in charge of the mourning, of the dissipation of one phantom begotten onto another.

Goodbye, she whispers, her hand gauntly and appetite diminished, her mind wavering between a place of no thought and every thought.

Her emptiness dismissed by her want and need for explanation, in a land that whispers without voice and forethought: there exists no need.

But if all that she is be need, then what is she?

Again she dies upon self, self-inflicted no more, pierced by the echo of evergreen.

How can she be this ghost of unraveling;

Her death made known to no one and no thing?

Her heart pierced by what ifs and circumstance that never need rise, since all is fallen.

She walks in the forest, a demon twisted into raven, a plastered wall onto herself, lost between the space leading from one room to another.

Until all rooms explode and the house is hovering in the existence of space.

And still the house crumbles and woman bled dry remains, withered and emptied of soul.

And here she wavers, a distant shell.

The only passerby another illusioned being that hears the self’s whisper of ocean wave gone.

A distant calling centered at the dolphin’s heart—he too swimming in a pool of imaginings.

He too wondering where the trees have gone.

404: The Space In Between

| Aspergers Girls

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?

379: I am very saddened by the state of the world

| Aspergers Girls

shaman

I am very saddened by the state of the world. While I can only speak of the nation I occupy, I gather enough from others that similar events are happening globally.

No matter how long I live on this earth, I am continually confused by many people’s behaviors and actions. Manipulations, lies, and false-intentions aside, I am dumbfounded by the angry-hearts and finger-pointing souls.

It seems so obvious to me: don’t judge another until you have entirely looked at your complete self and accepted who you are, learned to love yourself, and made a vow to be the best person you can be.

And hopefully, by the way of nature, having been through that process, the ability to judge simply ceases. Therefore, I find myself in a quandary, as what I feel within borders much on judgment, though I hope it resembles in form more of a heartfelt discernment.

I watch all around, in this place I find myself a part of, and see people acting out of spite and bitterness. To me, this seems as children at play, individuals who have somehow never gained what some of us were naturally born with. So many walking blindly, a victim of their self-created unbridled passion, set upon a path of feeding the darkness more dark.

I am at a crossroad of self, in many ways looking back at where I have been, without harboring much thought or even intention. Neither am I looking forward. I have tossed away the childish ways of dwelling anywhere other than I am, but still the present lingers here and penetrates my being, reminding me of why, in the past, I so often chose the route of escape over living. And I cannot help but think that the gentle souls of the world continue to choose the same, to slip back into a part of self, where the light is pure and the surroundings safe.

My hope lies in the minority. For in them I see this endless river of kindness, acceptance, and genuineness. And there is where I choose to see my own reflection, in the soul inhabiting this lost planet, which continues to shine despite the glaring dark broadcasted by the deceitful and righteous ones.

I am by no means a religious scholar, but I have had my share of studies in theology. What strikes me as evident is that many religions and spiritual paths have the answers; they speak of not judging, not lying, not cheating, not stealing; they speak of detachment, release of the desire for material ways, and unconditional love. Yet, it seems, that still most of society is buzzing all around, hounded by some beasts, corralled in like sleeping sheep, and made to behave in ways that may not be notorious but are as equally damaging.

It seems I am made, as I be, to walk in this world half-blinded to the ways of the majority, left outside of the fenced-in and blinded, and watching from a hilltop wishing for my brothers and sisters to join me and step out of the illusion of hatred. I am made this forever minority, for separation seems the only prize over entrapment of soul.

Today, I do not choose to celebrate tragedy or turn a disaster into a false idol. I will not choose to share grotesque images, nor to splatter hearsay and falsehoods. I see no benefit.

Have we become a united people whom can only feel close when disaster strikes? If so, what then will keep the disaster from repeatedly happening? What if there was silence upon disaster? What if there was just support, love, protection and safety; and the rest, the disastrous aftershock of tragedy, the spawned pods of evil, were left behind—just dropped, just forgotten, or at minimum ignored. What would the dark broadcast then, and what would we hold onto?

There is a part of me that knows I would be better to release this, to let go of this pain, as I do the rest, to detach from the horrors before my eyes—the dark aftermath of disaster. To close my eyes as the wolves circle in tighter and tighter, the false prophets, of modern day, spinning their webs of deceit; our neighbors joining in the game of hatred and rebel, or perhaps shedding their own tears in the spotlight. See me—notice me—love me. Why not just claim you need attention without the façade of displaying a tragedy to bring you forward? And why spread images of hope or horror based on tragedy with your name stamped upon the photo; how obvious that this is a way of profiting from suffering, whether for self-attention or material gains.

I don’t understand how people can be blinded to their own motives and own intentions. How they cannot feel what they are doing. See how they are acting. And if they are aware, how they can continue forward. Who are these people, as I do not belong to them?

And for the ones gently retreating, doing their part to help in silent fashion, without want of recognition, without need to scream, what of their dear, dear hearts? Who are these ones who humbly serve? How I wish to join you in prayer or meditation, and walk in the light at your side.

I do not understand this world or my place in it. Existing here seems like living on a giant stage of fools, with everyone rushing to be seen and be recognized, everyone in this giant game of Monopoly.

I am deeply saddened, today. I am not sad entirely because of the events of the original disaster—I hurt for the families and the loved ones—but at the same time I recognize disasters happen all over the world. People die in horrific ways all the time. People suffer. People are beaten, tortured, enslaved, persecuted, starving, and so on. There is no shock to me when disaster comes—the only shock is when I see what should by now be familiar, the clamoring for attention, resurfacing of the dark feeding upon the dark, ways and means that remind me of how far we’ve yet to come.

I am sad mostly because I live in a society that has been in essence brainwashed, a place where people are bombarded with negativity and bred to believe in lacking, and behave as if in desperate need. If the world were a spinning top, and I were still child, I would halt the toy entirely, and just let the earth breathe, let the people step out of self and watch. How I wish people could see they are love, they are light, and not these false illusions they have claimed.

I sit here very much isolated, unable and unwilling to share in the masses way of being, unable to take part in a celebration of the darkness. It is like being made to sit in the coliseum of ancient Rome, whilst crying, when all about people are cheering. It is like, this agonizing grief, a singular one watching from a singular window, waiting for the world to stop.

348: I Still Have Those Days

| Aspergers Girls

Photo on 3-23-13 at 9.57 PM #2

Today I did the equivalent of stacking toy blocks or lining up cars. I spent a good three hours going through thirty posts on my blog, reading, summarizing, and reposting in uniform formation. I had to. There was no choice. I was on the couch, seated with my laptop until three pm, and that was most of my day. It didn’t matter that there were blue skies out, or that it was a Saturday full of possibilities. I knew I needed to retreat, if not by choice, then by necessity.

For despite my strong faith in God, my strong faith in self, and in my life and calling, I still have those days. Heck, I have those moments throughout each and everyday, where I just don’t think I can make it through. I don’t think about ending my life; I am nowhere near those thoughts. But I do imagine what life would be like if I was someone else, how that simplicity would feel.

There are times I savor the thought of simplicity. I recognize no one’s life is easy, but I too know that there are people who don’t worry from the moment they wake up if today they will be able to leave the house, if today they will be able to face the person in the mirror and recognize who they see, if today will be a day dominated by fatigue and pain.

Today I couldn’t stand myself; not in a large degree, actually not even in a small degree. And I guess it wasn’t really that I couldn’t stand myself, it was more so that I was weary and oh so tired of battling with my self. I just needed to stop, to turn off all of the decision-making, the have to’s, the when’s and where’s. I just needed reprieve.

I felt foolish at times, a mommy and wife, physically functional for the most part, but entirely incapable of doing anything but stacking her imaginary bricks, soothing herself through repetition, words, and numbers. Again and again.

When the stacking was through I wrote; I wrote to friends and then I wrote the previous post, because I needed relief. I wrote what I saw in images and heard in sounds, and I scribed until much of the angst was out of me. I realize I might be the only one that understands the prose, and I reasoned with myself that was okay, completely okay.

And I searched for the word okay further, to apply the word to myself like some special-ordered salve. I am okay. I am okay. I am okay. I kept repeating those three words to myself in scattered whispers.

I was so absorbed in not leaving the couch, I forgot to drink water and I forgot to eat. I just couldn’t move from the couch.

I don’t know why it is I was made the way I am, and why my life is the way it is. I know living can be hard. I know this. But somehow I keep going and keep trying. I keep looking at the woman in the mirror and saying bless you, if not in thought, then from a distant land, a place in the future, where I am aged and have lived long and well. A place where I am proud of where I have traveled and what I have accomplished.

Eventually I got up, showered, and went out with the family. I won’t say there weren’t moments I wasn’t crying in bed not wanting to leave. Because I did dread leaving. I listened to my thoughts, became the observer. I knew what was going on. They were familiar messages: “You are too ugly to leave the house. No one loves you. You are worthless. You are not enough.”

And I battled more and more and more. But in the end I rose. I bid the woman in the mirror hello, I woman I did not recognize or want. And despite the nagging voices, I wiped away my sadness and I tried. I tried to be this someone I am supposed to be.

Most days aren’t this hard, not this filled with doubt and struggle. I know part of my experience is hormonal. I know I will snap out of my melancholy when my chronic physical pains subsides some. And I know my brain is still processing a busy week past.

I didn’t want to forget this day though or leave this day out. Because in many ways these are the days that make me stronger, these are the days I look back upon and think I made it. I made it through again. I made it through to another day.

346: The Love I Am (A review of emotions, joy, fear, and pain)

| Aspergers Girls

I remember sitting on my bed in my early twenties and realizing with a sudden revelation that I did not know how to feel joy. In fact, in analysis, I concluded then that in the past several years I had not recognized many emotions. Generally I felt anxious, nervous, over-concerned, shy, out-of-place, insecure, depressed, sad, and worried. That was all I could feel. I could not feel anger. I could not feel love. My feelings for my significant other were all wrapped around fear of abandonment. I could feel fear.

I went from extreme emotional highs to extreme lows. I now believe this was not biologically induced. I think I made myself purposely cycle through thought-processes. If I was not extremely high (overly-anxious, overly-obsessed, overly-concerned), I was extremely low (unable to leave the house, fatigued, depressed). There wasn’t a manic high of joy, elation, grandiose thoughts, and magical-viewing of the environment and self. In the high-state there was only this inability to let go of fear, which led me to act out (OCD-like behavior, rituals, non-stop analysis) in order to eliminate thoughts. In the low-state there was the same inability to let go of fear, but my efforts to eliminate the thoughts were displayed through withdrawing, sleeping, and retreat.

I still go through these same states. Though I now know what the middle ground of emotions feels like. I think I “make” myself go through these states in an attempt to feel joy. I used to only feel joy when I was transitioning from one state (low) to the other (high). And even then, only for a fleeting moment.

In the past, and at this moment, I cannot experience this sensation of fleeting joy/happiness without the anxiety tagging along and questioning me, like some annoying tailgating friend I attempted to shake of millions of times before: “Are you sure you’re happy? Is this happiness? Will it last? How do you know it is happiness? Why are you happy? Are you being selfish? Is this self-based?”

My being seems incapable of holding onto this type of joy, and joy alone. This joy has to have companions of suspicion, dread, over-analysis, and such. And I utilize the word “have” because that is how the experience registers for me.

In the same line of thought, my extreme lows which include the inability to move, the discomfort of being me, and the fatigue of simply thinking, comes too with a posse of entities—emotions garbed as “why again,” “what is happening,” “why can’t I control my own self.”

This doesn’t feel like a mood disorder to me, though I see how my behaviors, and possibly thoughts, would present themselves as so. To me, this teeter-tottering is always pinpointed to an exact spot of awakening to the highest step of anxiety or lowest step of deep sorrow. I can find a reason. I can in retrospect see where I was switched from one extreme to the other.

Typically, I feel the mixture of joy and dread when I have 1) Accomplished a goal that I was afraid I would never accomplish; 2) Accomplished a goal in which I was fixated from the start and glad to be done; 3) Completed something I was dreading for days; 4) Received good news after worrying about bad news; 5) Received a compliment about my appearance, as I am insecure about the way I physically look.

In review, each of these supposed “joys” is accompanied by a fear or “negative aspect.” For example, in number one, “I was afraid,” and in number two “I was fixated.”

For a long time, this was the only way I could feel sporadic spurts of mixed joy: by attaching a fear or negative aspect, and then with some stimuli (another person, place, thing, event, words) the negative aspect is momentarily released and that moment of release feels to me akin to joy. For me, when the negative aspect I placed on self is temporarily removed, joy steps in.

In fact, in my mind, and in my scenario of feeling, I cannot feel this type of joy without first attaching an element of “negativity” and/or “fear.”

In contrast, in my moments of fear, in my low state, I have attached hope or the “best case scenario.” I create in my mind the release, the escape, or the rescue and I wait. I set myself in a cage, much akin to a prison, where I’ve locked myself away in darkness, and then wait. What I am waiting for is the removal of deep pain, and I have decided, somewhere deep in my mind or spirit that this removal will only happen in a specific way. For example, in sighting past experiences, this might be, this release of pain through the removal of a stimuli: an illness going away, a person coming and going, a meeting passing, a phone call received.

Here seems to be the tipping point, or the starting point of where my fleeting joy begins. While I sit readily in this cage of misery, I am creating the future of joy I hope to see. Whilst worrying immensely in a non-stoppable way and running through all the possibilities and strings of variable outcomes I can, I am in a direct way preparing to feel release and joy in the near future. This is to me, seemingly like a junkie in need of an adrenaline high. I am making myself increasingly low, so when the event or stimuli arises that apparently lifts me from outside of my self-inflicted prison, I am brought to a state of infinite fleeting freedom. In extreme emotion, I am brought high above myself and able to at last feel beyond suffering. I am creating my own high.

It is only in the in between state, between the middle part of prison and the freedom of elation that I feel the fleeting joy. I quickly rise past the joy to the state of high-anxiety, as the doubts and questioning sets in. This is why, after much processing about a possible scenario that could lead to my demise, failure, rejection or the lot, I will appear momentarily elated with relief when the scenario does not turn out in the thousand terrible ways I thought, but then I will quickly switch of the invented and created false feeling of joy and question my emotion. This will then put me in a state of shutdown, where I am wondering why I worried to the degree of physical and emotional, even spiritual ache, for the gift of fleeting fake joy brought on by a self-invented high.

Is this indeed a process I have created in an attempt to feel human? In an attempt to feel what “I am supposed to feel?” Am I lacking something or some chemical? I don’t think so.

I think this is the way my mind works itself out of confusion, in an attempt to unravel all the thoughts that are bombarding me, including all the stimuli, constant awareness, and confusion. I think this is my mind’s way of putting me into protection. I think in my cell of worry is the only time I feel safe from the world. To me, the fear-state is more liken to protection and safety than the joy state. For joy crashes and fear remains. Fear is predictable and stays with me as I loop and over-think; joy emerges as this falsehood and leaves me abandoned.

Do I like the cell perhaps more than I acknowledge? Is the cell the darkness I need to retreat to in order to renew? Am I, like the caterpillar, in need of continual metamorphoses? And if I am turning into a butterfly from the retreat out of darkness then why do my wings suddenly disappear?

In living, I have gained some recognition of middle emotions, the more subtle emotions of: satisfaction, contentment, serenity, connection, gentle-anticipation; but as these subtle emotions surface and are identified, I analyze where they have come from. I wonder which came first, my own thought, or the emotion; and often conclude my thought brought this emotion; and then I go into a place of deep thinking of when and where this thought came into existence that caused this emotion, and if this is indeed an emotion I welcome; and if this emotion comes from a place of selflessness, ego-release, and love. If the emotion/thought, both spun out together with thought in a slight lead, are not from a place of benefit for me and others, I then review why I have created these non-beneficial thoughts.

Where before for four-decades I was highly unaware of my own thoughts and emotions, and felt numb to the world, unless in a place of extreme anxiety or extreme low, now I am highly-aware of my experience, each moment analyzing and questioning my experience here, in this place I have been told isn’t really here at all. I have fed myself with so much factual data, through various sources and through moments of awakenings, that I cannot help but to try to place my own emotional/thought experience into a category.

My mind categorizes. I was built, I believe to a degree, to sort and categorize, to circumvent my emotional wiring and dig beneath and pull out what is occurring. I am a computer analyzing the computer-self. The mind boggles and I am left, wishing to do nothing but to be simple in the extreme, to wash away the complexity and start again anew and refreshed.

In an attempt to pull myself out of myself, I continually study and analyze, not just words and visual sources, but thoughts and happenings. I analyze the trees, the sky, the movement of all, even the invisible and untouchable. I analyze because I am attempting to take the moment I am set free from prison, to capture that fleeting flicker, and rise with this moment in true form of butterfly.

The dilemma is in finding myself lost in self, and reviewing the past data (Eastern philosophies of escape from mind), and then trying to understand this absence of thought, as I am built to a degree where the past ways of transcending (absence of thought; deep meditation in silence of mind) and completing the process of thought (silence and retreat after reflection) are foreign. I seem incapable of mastering my own mind enough to sit in the stillness of release. My brain appears so high-powered by some high-force that I am suited best for the prison of darkness as my retreat.

But there is hope, always hope.

And this hope is found in one way.

I have been able to at last find rescue from my own self in the act of giving of self. When I come from a place of pure intention to give without recognition or reward, I am set free. This is where the butterfly is meant to fly.

What I have been doing for so long is releasing myself from the cage and giving myself the imagined joy. I have been trying to hold onto a joy for self, and to build up self with joy, as this is what has been demonstrated by society: to make myself happy; to be happy; to find happiness. But this is not right; at least not my right, if right was to be.

I am not put here to make myself happy. I don’t need to be happy. Innately, beneath this façade of thoughts that generates a façade of emotions, I am happy. And I know this. I am not confused by self. I am confused by the thoughts and emotions, because beneath I am a spirit having a human experience. But my suit, my human suit is not adjusted, it is open enough so that the experience of human is confusing, debilitating, and disconcerting; I have spent eons, or what appears eons, trying to master my thoughts and emotions, when the freedom is not found in mastery of the invisible and illusion: mastery is found in the release of this humanness.

There is no direct way to self, as I am already self. There is no direct way to free myself of thoughts and emotions, as they do not even exist. They are not real.

Yes, I feel. Yes, I experience. But ultimately after a lifetime of analyzing my own experience, I see the illusion I have created. And though I stand in a lonely place at times, in reality, in my reality, I am finally able to grasp joy, and this joy is not fleeting. This joy does not bring out invisible scissors that eventually clip and remove my wings. I do not bleed from this joy, nor do I suffer.

I am attuning self enough to know that false joy will not last, and thusly this false, self-created, and self-wanting joy feels poisonous to me. I want to spit the falsehood out, and bring out the reinforcement of armies with swords in hand and slice away at false joy with question. I feel attacked when the questions come, when the illusion of joy is destroyed, but I am not attacking anything but illusion upon illusion. I am not attacking anything but selfish want and selfish joy.

Joy to me is only found in giving. This is my place of joy. This is how I am wired. I have been trying to live like the rest say to live, to fill myself in order to be fulfilled. But I am ultimately fulfilled when another is fulfilled. I am filled when I am able to bring joy to another. I am filled when the love I have for another is received. I am filled when I know in my deepest knowing that I am not wanting for self and self alone. There is no way around this for me. I still take comfort in the fineries of good food, decorative clothes, and good friends; these can bring me happiness. But this is not a happiness that stays. I see this. I recognize this. And thusly, my mind creates a stage of battles, where I am once again made supposed victim as the questions slice away at the supposed joy. But I am no less victim than the tree pecked by the woodpecker. I am made home for the world, for the flying birds, when I am carved out and hollowed. And in this place, when the world slips inside of me for shelter, I am joy.

And so it is my journey begins with intention. If I set out to love the world, to give of myself freely, without motive for self, then I shall receive endless abundance and joy that I can time and time again return to and tap into. This joy might waver with the wavering of my thoughts and emotions, but this joy is there always. This joy is always there. This joy is love of others, and in so loving other, love of self. There is no non-benefit to giving and loving freely. There just isn’t. When I come from a place of love, I am free. When I do not, I am imprisoned. There is no other place for me than from a place of love.

I think now that I was made the way I am to force myself into finding love. Here I have been searching to love myself, to change myself, to change my thoughts and emotions, to change my way of being, when all along the key was so very simple: love.

Here I was searching to understand love, to understand love through ownership and misinterpretation, and needing and wanting, and sometimes constant desiring, but that is not love. Love is not found in the one or in the self. Love is not found through the desire to receive. Love is not fleeting. And so often the love I have thought I have found, though unrecognizable, unidentifiable, and uncomfortable, still did not fit. No matter how hard I tried to make love fit, it did not. That is because I was searching for a suit of love for me, something to wear to soothe and protect the suffering beneath. But garments age; they tear, they break; no matter what we do they disintegrate, they become outdated, they eventually stink. The only love that can complete me must be outside the self and unattached from the self, something so immense and immeasurable that fear escapes in the infinite abundance.

I know now how to be happy.

Happiness is found in the detachment of love from self, so that love may fly freely. For it is not the butterfly I am that needs to find and wear her wings, it is the love I am that needs to soar.