So today, a middling overcast day in the middle of July, the sea ripples white and gray in the near distance and the trees and bushes wave in intermittent gusts that roll across its vast surface. Already half of my self-granted one year sabbatical has passed, and I have about 200 pages of the drug book written but by no means completed, as each day contains the struggle to create, to organize and systematize and create, to funnel something meaningful through this opening in Being’s myriad surface, and on the same days to swim in the great unconscious mass of the ocean, immersed as a human metaphor for the letting go that is at the center of my current existence.
I realize, now, that my past anger and anxiety and tension had its self-protective function – how it kept me distracted from the simple leap of being, of remaining here, where ever here is, so that I could at least do it justice through the art of witnessing. Anger is a deal like any other deal, a transaction that seems to remove that most threatening of enemies – uncertainty; but at the price of the very same attachment that the Buddha professed is at the heart of all suffering.
Of course the desire to capture and re-present any aspect of this wild and wavering world is an arrogance almost beyond saying; its present magic is so deep, so unique, so precious in its manifestation that it calls out to be preserved from the great maw of nothingness at the same moment that it passes away; we live it and we lose it, coming closer and closer to the fundamental realization that our true existence is as pure awareness, pure essence, nothing more and nothing less. Life is a stage and we are but players, insisting on doing something with our fortuitously granted lives, attaching great importance to its details and its outcome even as it fades into the ineffable cosmic background noise.
But nonetheless I will plow on, will no doubt complete the project of my days, for am I not Irish and is not that what we do? Make something out of this mass of undefined stimuli, plow the unbroken ground, remove the stones and build some kind of crazy edifice that matters not and that time will inevitably wear away? To do that, in the full knowledge of its futility, is the only kind of heroism left to us moderns as we disappear into the subatomic world of bytes and waves.
It is what it is, the law of identity asserting its simple fullness as well as its complexity; today is today and should not be obscured by tomorrow or yesterday.