Bless the Rains

I like who I am. But I do not love who I am. I understand my actions because I am the only one who feels and knows my conscience. But just because I understand them does not mean that I desire them once they have been acted out. And just because I feel and know my conscience does not mean that I admire it or hold it above anything else, holding myself on a righteous step. I am neither righteous nor bold. Billy Corgan would grin at that.

I read earlier this week that one should not be so hard on oneself because they are doing their best. And that’s good enough. And if they are not doing their best then they are simply doing. And that’s good enough too. And if they aren’t doing then they are being. And that’s good enough too. And that’s where it ended. But what is intrinsic to that? What is the subtraction? What is left? What is this numb existence I feel where my decisions and actions and emotions seem to step away from my grasp at every exertion? What is this cloudy strolling that I pursue telling myself that my steps are in the right direction? I would label it as doubt. I would label this feeling as a doubtful existence. Not yet hopeless, but straining to find hope. I see and feel beauty, in the world and in myself, but that beauty doesn’t seem to add confidence to my step or to my reach.

Earlier this morning, after a moment of breathing in the sun, I kept my eyes closed. My face was in the sun and my eyes were closed. While I was laying down I repeated to myself (under the guidance of deliberately slow and smooth and then deliberately battering and accelerating breaths) to surrender, to let go, to accept all that lay waiting for me, but waiting for me only because my action would take me there. But still, surrender. My action had already brought me here to this moment in time, breathing and telling myself to surrender. I sat up, eyes still closed and my heart rate the lowest it had been in weeks, my mind emptied of expectation and want, open to what lay behind my eye lids out there in the world but also within. When one’s eyes are closed it is dark, but I had a light in front of me, the sun pushing against the skin of my eye lids on a Saturday morning. The light in the dark, expressed and caught as the burnt orange and pink of a sunlit eye lid. This was the beauty in the dark. The emptiness of expectation and desire was the beauty in the dark. And that gave space for things to move and change and new perspectives to be achieved. That ignited hope.