So now as I inch my way toward closing at least the northern part of my great Vermont adventure, and advance toward the challenge of a full-on devotion to inwardness and aesthetic/spiritual devotion, I find myself reminding myself again and again about the first great rule of inward devotion – don’t worry about it.
Many times a day my mind turns its spotlight on that space that typically contains the crisis-of-the-moment, only to remind myself, sometimes a bit exasperatedly, that the space is empty, void, and deficient of all content. There is nothing to worry about, save death, sickness, isolation, failure, all the usual existential detritus that has been plaguing mankind for as long as he has had reflective thought. I am, nearly, free. I have found a place to be free, something to do with my freedom, and companions with whom to share the fruits of freedom. For the first time, really, rather than pushing myself I can follow myself, whatever that means. I can get behind myself and support myself and keep myself from falling backwards as I am shot through with imaginary obligations. I can scan the ontological horizon for curious manifestations of being and, if possible, nothingness. Other than that which fulfills my spirit, there is nothing that I “have” to do. I can put first things first and second things second and everything else I can just spread around and stumble over when the time is ripe. The rope that I allowed to be tied around my neck is gradually growing more slack and soon the play will allow yards of spontaneous dashing about, and any paranoia about that looming backward yank will be, unto the final moments, misplaced.
So now I drive north, one of the last times on this particular mission, that of earning material karma and money, as I slowly allow to sink in lessons in living that I should have learned decades ago. But now is now, and all there is is now, all there is is is, and I no longer need to be complicit in my escape from the now. There is a good side to this now, mainly that is always is and, if lost, can be returned to like a faithful friend who, though abandoned for a time for brief affairs with the past and future, is still calmly waiting, as always, for my return. From now on I will do my best to live there.
I am sweeping off the last shards and flakes of the past and future and other distractions, and allowing myself to finally look and see what is in front of my eyes. I am allowing myself to be captured by the present, sitting in the silence of being, wealthy on the richness of the now being now for as long as I live, and, who knows, maybe beyond.