I am looking for a poem that says Everything
so I don’t have to write
anymore.
Tukaram
(17th Century Indian Poet)
I wake into early darkness. The moan of the blessed air conditioner, heliport-like, shrouds the morning sounds. It’s early, so early, 3:00-ish. Oh, I think, sleeping straight through till 3:00. And then the next wave of thought covers me with tiny tingles of anxiety: Wednesday. What’s the topic? Where’s the topic? Wednesday is the latest day in the week in which I find the blog, in which the blog finds me.
I’ve been writing a weekly blog for almost a year now. It is the rallying point of my week, an organizing factor of my emotional and spiritual growth. My commitment to this process, born from a longing to keep my writing practice alive and to explore the bizarre stratosphere of cyberworld community-building, has slowly gathered root in me. The joy of my week comes not from the discovery of the topic, but from the deliciousness of the writing; the unfolding of the puzzle, the word-by-word plodding, searching forward, one word tugging forward the next. And then, the rewriting! The fullness of immersion into ideas and the sounds of the language—it fills me up. It ends when I am done, no longer able to abide the words, to read/reread/and read again the ideas. It is organic, this finishing, and it is perfect. And I trust it. (Oh, to trust other aspects of my life as much!) Then finally, the release of the writing into the world, into your world, whoever you are, people I know and don’t—the outlandish wonderfulness of that connection awes me.
This blogging process had become a vastly fulfilling part of my world. And—here’s the kicker—I don’t want to do it. Not on Wednesdays in the early mornings, lying in the dark. I don’t want to risk—to search—to feel—to not know—to have to look and grow, look and grow, again and again. I don’t want to. And of course, I do want to. More than anything in my world. I do. And I will.
So what is up with this ambivalence? Like this fantastic poem by Tukaram, I want to land it all, like one of those fantastic gymnastic dismounts in the Olympics, I want to land on the mark, be spiritually enlightened, tell you all about it, and, adios. I don’t even know what “adios” would look like…..Netflix Streaming for the rest of my life?
I want to say everything, with depth and humor, and be done. I want to experience all spiritual lessons, all of the growth which my soul needs, and be finished. Obviously this is not the nature of spiritual growth, which is the plodding, the ongoing, the glory of the daily trudge of practice.
This blog is both a proclamation and a celebration (weak as it might be) of my spiritual longing and my equally powerful ambivalence about that very longing. And as much as I yearn for that oneness, as true and as alive in me is my frantic need to spiritually transcend the inevitable journey. Welcome, Aruni, to the human dilemma.
I sit on the couch now, watching the light fill the day. The trees dance in the morning breeze, cloudy sky framing them as silhouettes in a brightening grey. Sometimes it all feels too hard. And of course, it isn’t. It just feels that way. Oh. And then I remember the truth of it, all:
The end? It is now. The beginning, the end, the middle, they all live in this complete and whole moment. There is nowhere to go. There really is nothing much to do. We are already home. We just forget.
Dear Folks, what is it that you forget? Where do you notice your ambivalence, your longing for something that is followed by your hesitation for that very thing? How does that express in the World of You? Keep me posted, dear Cyber-Friends.