I’ve been trying to be immortal.
Now I can’t pee right,
and my foot is swollen.
Friends have died recently. Others are facing it first hand. My younger siblings have already experienced the death of a spouse or a stroke or life-threatening
…Tag: empty path
So difficult to sit doing nothing
unless enforced by the presence of others.
Alone, I want to be busy every moment.
What makes me uneasy with stillness?
Uneasiness itself?
I’m not doing anything!
You are breathing, pumping blood.
Holding down the chair.
Filling space.
Dying.
No. That word
came from elsewhere than cleverness.
That word is
closer to the bones.
I feel stalled
and confounded.
Snow
not yet fallen
chills me and
gets in my way.
I do not want to slow down,
let go,
wait.
Yet I must,
either restlessly
or willingly.
Nothing seems fixed.
… There is a grave error in the penitential notion of “mortifying the body.”
It replicates the false dualism of “spirit versus matter ” that crept into and overwhelmed the Jewish faith and practice of Jesus as his followers spread out through the Greco-Roman world.
A truer practice is to “affirm the body,” to affirm it as a mortal yet sacred part of the divine whole.
When I allow myself to suffer the large or small sufferings of my body,
There is no way to
move through life except
to
lift your foot from
where it was
and
place it
farther
ahead.
Image: “Giacomond,” by Quint Buchholz (1984) [Quibu, CC BY-SA 4.0,
…
There isn’t really an end
to this.
Coasting forward or
drifting sideways or back,
We never reach a goal.
It’s a matter of equilibrium,
homeostasis.
It’s not
a matter of
getting to enlightenment,
… 
Stop wasting
time
being
consciousness.
“You”
does not
exist.
It is a path
of illusory
linear time
through the
sphere
of
Creation
which
is
all
at
The emptySome nights, some, mornings, I lay awake or come awake with my mind full of unfinished checklists of things I need to get done in the mundane world. So oppressive. the sense of impossibility—impossible even to prioritize, let alone to do.
How do we ever get through this life? It’s as if we feel we must have each breath, each heartbeat on a To Do list, else we will die. Why do our minds betray us in this way? Why
…
For several months I have felt as if I were slipping back into clinical depression again.
The outward signs are here. The fogged thinking, lack of enthusiasm, fussiness, longing to sleep. The undertone of despair. All too generalized to ascribe to any one or cluster of causes.
Yet somehow the subtle bodily symptoms I’ve come to recognize over the decades are not really present. As a scientist in the medieval sense—someone who seeks to know—I’ve looked inwardly for years at
…