Right at this moment, on paper, I am a total failure.
Truly. If I were to write down all of my faults one would assume I was either a criminal, vagrant or some sort of destitute mentally ill person.
All of which I am not.
I just happen to be cresting a wave of defeats and emotional challenges one after the other right now.
I know I'm not alone, especially in this economy. People are tired and desperate. Suffering financial insecurity on top of whatever emotional and or personal challenges that all humans face or flee at one point or other in their lives. We all share change, we have to because no one has invented a way to stop time. Not yet anyway. And with the passage of time comes change. No denying it.
What has been revealed to me that I find incredibly interesting, however and that is also very new for me which i can only attribute to my age and willingness to stay clear and present, is the way I seem to be able to step back out of my emotional connection to my life and simply observe it. It's almost laughable! I have never been able to do this before! The basic idea came from a Dharma talk I listened to a while back but it stuck so easily and started becoming almost second nature immediately.
I sort of step out of my feelings when they start to get big and try to observe my relationship with the experience I am having at that time.
Over the weekend, no actually over a period of about twenty four hours, I went through such a massive arch of feelings from enraptured to humiliated, shamed and rejected all in one day.It was an unavoidable experience that life just threw at me and believe me, lately I have become a skilled drama evader. This was just one of those inevitable roller-coasters that we all have to ride eventually, and this morning, Monday morning, as I started a very busy week on a very weary psyche I found myself in the midst of one of the most beautiful metaphors I have ever had the pleasure to sense.
I feel that life for me is a great and terrible storm right now, surging forward in giant menacing sets. Life has risen up in a gale like this for me before but I found endless and sometimes very creative ways to hide and turn away from the barrage.
This time I feel my legs firmly planted, anchored into the ground and my stance is solid. I feel like I am facing life's massive endless ocean head on, but I am lit from within. There is a warm glow heating me from the inside out so that I remain relatively comfortable with the cold biting rain and waves crashing against me. They will not uproot me. I will remain standing. The bitter cold will not overcome me, I have a continuous heat source that can not be reached by it's weathered frosty tentacles.
I don't know why but I am in awe of the current of feelings passing through me. I can feel everything and it excites me. I can feel the storm surging all around me, I can taste the salt water, like blood blasting through and around me, eroding me. Natures force changing me and breaking down all my old ideas about who I am or what I thought I wanted out of life. It burns and stings like horseradish in the back of your nose. Behind the pain is a pleasure. A knowing that my core still remains and always will. The pain of the present is the birth of the future and I am unassisted. I am alone.
Nothing makes me feel more connected to one and all thing like this embraced realization of alone-ness.
Nothing gives me more hope than the knowledge that I have no idea what is to come. No idea how this eroded glowing figure will unfold as the surge recedes. But I am grateful for this time, this life, and these thoughts and images. I am grateful to be able to express them in the ways I do. I am grateful for the sense I have of benevolence within that alone-ness. I will stay the course and ride the storm. The surge will recede and once it does..it will be a new world
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