You are not going anywhere

Life showed up at the door with another test. Frustrated, I told my partner which is silly.  What really he supposed to do mimic my frustration? It doesn't involve him and he has own problems. By not mirroring it, he with his own wisdom did not meet it head on. He let it die on its own. He reminded me that we all die, and this won’t be the last. Saying again, “All we leave when we die are the good deeds we do while alive, that are important.” Really, the frustration rose out of the fact that I was still there, and could not run out of the situation…..I was not going anywhere. Plus, no fairy with her magic wand would come and fix it. I would go into what it was, but that would distract others from finding their own innate wisdom. We all encounter such things and what we bring to the table is a history of reactions we may have learned in the past with our unique combination of traumas. If you did not have any, you would be dead by now. No one is immune.

Later, I watched the film, “All is Lost” and I went for a late night walk alone to get some air. I told my partner it was to get ice cream. Enjoying the night winds, I churned up some thoughts about being confronted with one’s upcoming death every second, and the natural survival that one gravitates toward even when it all seems hopeless.

We all die, so do we struggle with life’s dramas just to avoid this reality? Is it survival instinct or avoiding contemplating our death almost every second, like we should. Hopefully it will arrive onboard, and dictate how we treat others.

On my walk, I thought about my troubles, and then the actor in the film.  I knew to get out of this space,  it would come down to getting busy and helping others. It is not always about you and the gibberish your mind throws.

I knew where to look, and saw the couple again. I bought dinner for the blind couple who sing Isan tunes for spare change on a road overpass. Just in time because they were packing up for the night. Later, while sitting I watched a late night street vendor sit down, with a swollen knee bandaged, and smiled with compassion once I noticed his pain. I took off quickly to a late night pharmacy without saying anything to him, and bought some cream that has pain killer and anti-inflammatory while being cooling and hurried back to give him. I expected nothing in return, I just said hello, and pointed to my knee and gave him the cream and walked away. Immediately, any ideas of “me“ and my difficulties disappeared.

On the way back from giving the vendor his pain cream, I bought my partner two of his favorite taro ice cream bars. This wasn’t walk for me…it was for others. Little did I know, because I was gone long, my partner went looking for me, and while out he bought me two dark chocolate bars. It was funny when I came home, we exchanged ice creams.

I Know Who I Am, Because I Know I Am Not

I’m not a terribly optimistic person, I have a lot of major bad things happen to me. But that is not unique to me, many others have too, and this awareness was my first lightbulb moment to speed my healing. I am not a blameless clean slate either, but most all of it was not done to hurt others. So I have been lucky with a few long-term relationships and have a few close friends and family. I don’t seem to carry it around with me anymore in either a grumpy manner or too much negativity. I am instead more of a realist, with a smidgeon of compassion mixed with good intentions. I have overcome a lot, so one might be surprised that I am not a more a kind of whatever person. I see through people’s bullshit pretty easy, and despise being thought of as being stupid. This happens more often now with a speech disability than you could imagine. I wish I could laugh when people pull stuff like this, but to me it is never laughable because it is built on valuing the other less.

More often now, do some nice things for people or strangers as a kind of surprise when they least expect it. Someone might call it paying forward, and it is never done for others to feel indebted to me. I just remember that whenever someone surprises me with something unexpected, that I like the feeling of time stopped by it when the realization we are all one.

So when I sit down to meditate I am working the “me” apart from the ego and inching it towards just “I am.” Just being. This profound intimacy I have with the self, in meditation, only seems to provide with more relaxed feeling about who I am. This translates to less need to compare one to others, our paths are so unique that there is no way …I could be you. I know who I am, finally ...because I know who I am not.

Bliss

Where or when we see our true nature 
is not important.

^click above sentence for an audio treat^

One of them, years ago, 
like the day I shot this photo,
 sent me on my path,
 and it wasn't my near death.
Although that
helped.

It has not been a straight line, 
but the pins of delusion are quietly falling
 with more awareness.

Want a easy pointer?
Start with awareness of our death.
That was the main wake-up call that day
 that started me off.

I looked over a great valley view
 from a ancient site's pointed precipice,
realizing that it existed before me and it will after me.
So do “I” exist now?
For about 20-30 minutes, my “I” did not.

It was not scary,
it was an unbelievably freeing.

Countdown?

I tell my partner, "Go ahead to the pool, I’ll pick up the wet laundry." He replies, “Jai Dee!”, a title I recently gained with my meditation and relaxation into what is. Of course, it is not permanent, and I have to work on it constantly, with my many years of being over-reactive, generously conditioned by growing up with alcoholism.

Earlier today, he started singing near me while watching a youtube concert with headphones on….while I was meditating. I was just 25 minutes in and relaxing in my body. I felt anger arise in my body, but just watched it like it was an enemy of happiness. So, I took this opportunity to have some fun, because it was a subtle sign of him needing attention. He was facing me sitting on the bed, actually enjoying the quiet body near him. Then from a totally silent unmoving body, I just made a scary, “BOOO!” and a wild face. He loved it, although it scared him making his hair stand up on his arms.

I smiled and said, “It must be time to eat!” He motioned with his hands near his eyes, like horse blinders, “Gin Kao.” It was an inside joke, that I created when I noticed when he wants food, he wants it now, not 5 minutes nor a half-hour later.

If I am committed to our happiness, it can not be only a passive observation, and it has to be flexible and bend around every new obstacle. Even if is self-created. It can be as simple as relaxing and dropping any expectations. It is often observed as difficult at the moment, and believe me I still can beat myself up over this, but I'm learning and re-learning through observation. This is a great fast forward into the difficulties of aging happening all the time regardless of which age you are. To be sure I write about this mainly to remind myself, and if it helps others that is a plus.

Last night we walked up to the roof to see the year end fireworks, it felt like a foreign experience...a sober observation of others joys. I wondered if the others on the roof celebrating could see our causal relaxed interactions that have took over a decade of commitment to develop?

A New Skin Stretched on the Skeleton

I recently dreamed of my passing from a previous life, seemingly making concrete my connection to my partner as a young boy when I did not know him. Saying good-bye in dream like form not as I am now.  It was not really dying in the dream, just alluding to it, so there was no fear or panic. It was intriguing, which then prompts me to think about upon awakening about our desire to find meaning in our life. This dream may have come out of our talks about our connection, seeing his photo as a young boy or just purely wishing it so. 

On further examination it seems to me that there is really no meaning to our life, it is all a fabrication of my over-active mind. Thus trying to live a virtuous life, is really just a way of simplifying life, wiping half of the complications brought on without living this way. Living with virtue may seem selfish at times....we still want something. But it does bring about more connection with others and the world, so in the other way, you end up feeling less like the “boy in the plastic bubble.” This might freeing you up to serve others. It has been said in many books that service is one clear path to liberation. Liberating what? The self-concern whipped up by the “me” who projects himself as separate? Most people who have children would just say, “duh!” because this is a natural product of such a life. I chose this route when society gave me no other option. It thankfully has been changing rapidly in the last ten years, with gay marriage and parenting. 

If I put aside any choice I may have had as far as direction when you consider the universe directs every possible combination of life. Then it puts me back into not finding any meaning, but relaxing into what is here, right now, however it or life manifests. Relaxing is not something I do easily when things are difficult, but it points us directly back to that imaginary “me” that perceives this all.

Looking back, I was forced to relax when my brain injury happened in the hospital. I had no choice, zipping through life as though I was invincible to a complete dead stop. It is weird to think you consider yourself lucky to have a brain injury which exhausts you so much that you have to relax in a fog of unknowing. That fog, should be exactly the same as the “What is” that one should naturally arrive at for real happiness. A wild ride on the way there, at least, but way smarter than running looking for meaning in life.

All That's Left

Aware of my partner sleeping beside me, he morphed into the dream along with the fan’s breeze and the slight chill it made.  Blurring into this vignette... I was consulting an old friend from my past, who came out of my partner's body, about the wisdom we learned have so far. There were jokes and seriousness, and then our conversation slipped into a story, of us running with others along a dry-river bed. The others with us were a cross section of humanity, every race and age. It was a hurried pace, had a seriousness to it, but without panic. And we were rushing to our respective spots up an old water drainage hill that was covered in black oil. Where we each had our own spots were we could slip into cracks to our underground pods of safety.  Kind of like a dust devil we would spin ourselves in. That is, before the huge black hulk of a hill broke away from the valley floor and slid upward on our way to a new galaxy and a new planet to our surprise.

 

While running with others, we had brought the only thing we could take with us, the wisdom and knowledge that caring for others, is really all that we have that has any value. We made sure each other had slipped into our underground places with this knowledge in an orderly fashion before it left Earth to take us to a new home. Then the room with a faint glow, and dusty aura slipped back, awareness of the fan’s noise and the early morning birds singing…

I awoke at 4 am groggy, to my partner's showering once his awareness of having crashed earlier… exhausted and unwashed had rose him again to shower and brush his teeth, just so that he could hug me in appreciation for putting up with his mood the previous day. Then we slipped back into a loving slumber.

Dreams Vs. Reality

I have had two successive nights of dreams about meditation. It appeared to my mind as a separate existence, a refined and peaceful place marked as beyond a huge beautifully carved teak divider. In the dream, I marked each time I sat in invisible gel I painted on the divider. I marveled at how as it dried, it disappeared. It probably points to that fact that even with all the years, my practice has not fully manifested in daily life. Not in a bad way. I don’t appear to others as supremely relaxed, much in part to the difficulties processing that my brain injury has affected me. Of course, I am markedly better than I was 10 years ago, and life is a process where one is never done. A few people have noticed changes and it particular my partner. These dreams don’t smack of desires unfulfilled but more a sign of how the brain has divided my meditation experience vs. day-to-day living. I can hope that these two will merge closer, perhaps at the moment of death. So be it.

Then, last night, my third night I had dreams about people close to me that died young, and they came back to make jokes with me about my older body versus when they knew me. It was pleasant and welcoming sign of getting closer to existing like them.  It never appeared as a nightmare, and they were very friendly and fun dreams. I even woke with the desire to call them. When people young die close to you and often faster than expected(20 and 30’s) you scramble to figure out your own existence masking your hurt at the time. I had fortified myself to appear stronger than what was felt internally. These things come out as you meditate, often in a good way….a natural cry of release of all you held back. This is not happening now but did the first couple years of long retreats. Now, anything I would have held back in the past is felt immediately and reacted upon. For those that don’t meditate you don’t become helpless, you instead, become freer.