Waiting for them to go away,
or maybe just learning to live alongside them.

Unsolicited guests at the party of my life.

A deepening malaise clamors for an audience.

What it has to say remains unarticulated.

Perhaps I am being reminded, all too frequently, of how unenlightened I am.

Who knew?

Roots in the strangeness of caring too much?
We too often care in the wrong ways,
perhaps due to our high expectations of who we think we are supposed to be,
and therefore of others as well.

Care in the right, healthy ways.
About the right things, people, causes, animals, and life.

Often, it means learning to live an agenda-less life.

if we allow its potential to wash over us,

carrying the little self

through the self-pity

into true sorrow,

grief,

emptiness.

The moment arrives,

the revolution,

the repentance,

the turning around…

that it may become a blessing,

a benediction,

a good word to the living and

an honor to the dead.

enigma,

surface-doer of life,

overflowing with daditude,

making it happen,

stirring the pot,

restless yearning for whatever

lurks

around the next turn in the road.

You wanted more.

…more….

Not ready to depart this life,

you fought hard

to bend your body

to spirit-will.

But God -

or as Woody Allen once put it,

‘the Great Whatever’ -

apparently has other adventures for you,

ones that may yet surprise

and delight you

in ways unimaginable to those of us left here,

with the many traces of your

obvious existence

among us.

We know you love us,

did not want to leave us, and

grief

occupies our hearts,

not always with heart-wrenching sobs, but

always

with a gnawing, enveloping, sad,

very sad,

awareness of your

absence.

We celebrate your life,

well and fully lived.

Go with our blessings,

and our melancholy yet genuine smiles,

to whatever unpredictable life you find and make,

just barely,

on the other side of the veil.

recluse

engulfed by sadness

yet mysteriously

unaccountably content.

Floating down,

love,

from up there somewhere.

In abandonment,

freedom falls,

settles in,

spacious bones breathe,

extinguishing self.

No one is left.

Only a strange contentment.

Hmmmm….

“How can one be free from conditioning?”

Krishnamurti responds:

“Only by understanding, being aware of our escapes. Our attachment to a person, to work, to an ideology, is the conditioning factor; this is the thing we have to understand, and not seek a better or more intelligent escape. All escapes are unintelligent as they inevitably bring about conflict. To cultivate detachment is another form of escape, of isolation; it is attachment to an abstraction, to an ideal called detachment. The ideal is fictitious, ego-made, and becoming the ideal is an escape from what is. There is the understanding of what is, and adequate action towards what is, only when the mind is not longer seeking an escape. The very thinking about what is is an escape from what is. Thinking about the problem is escape from the problem, and the only problem. The mind, unwilling to be what it is, fearful of what it is, seeks these various escapes; and the way of escape is thought. As long as there is thinking, there must be escapes, attachments, which only strengthen conditioning.

“Freedom from conditioning comes with the freedom from thinking. When the mind is utterly still, only then is there freedom for the real to be.”

dropping down,

down,

into some disorganized arrangement.

Sometimes we ask,

“Why?”

Acceptance: a profound yet simple intention,

a commitment to what is not known or necessarily understood.

The clinging, grasping

ceases,

along with the ambition, drive, yearning, desire for what one does not yet have.

Do we need to figure these out?

Or is there a freedom now,

to wander about in the spaciousness?

It seems a divine vision, or reconciliation, is found in the abandonment of hopes, the ones rooted in ideas one has about oneself.

Are we ever where we imagined we would be?

Faith is knowing, trusting, that things are what they are for a purpose greater than our current imaginings.