radical emptiness

there is a beautiful woman in my life, my dearest friend and soul sister, who is currently in the middle of watching her life burn down around her. she is about half thrilled and half mortified, and remembering that feeling, i feel honored beyond belief that i get to watch her burn. i think she is the most beautiful creature i have ever known.

the funny thing about spirituality is that it's not at all what we think it is, when we're playing little ego games and trying to create some superhero identity of holy wisdom or divine intent. genuine, real spirituality is not about building a single thing at all. it's about being brave enough to put down the mortar and glue you've had welded into your fists your whole life - shoring up the illusion of a separate self - and take off the fireproof suit. from there, from that first step, real spirituality can begin. it's not a path of icons and mantras and rainbows and inner children. it is a bloody, messy battle and the absolute worst part is that once the fire is burning you realize there's not a single damn thing you can do except learn to breathe smoke.

i am not in a place of knowing these days. i have unknown myself backwards into radical emptiness. there is not a single thing that can be known, thought, felt, touched, smelled, seen or otherwise that i would call my own. there is only this vast, vast, vast....................................... nothing. in all directions.

spirituality brought me here. the insane bloody deconstruction of two years of my life, and the absolute only time i have ever really known myself to be a creature of abject faith. because no matter how much it hurt, i just knew i was being drawn home. of course, the illusion of a gate looked rather like a black hole, and all the gravity was being squeezed from my veins and i was being flattened, emptied and otherwise crushed.... but i just knew in my guts that this was the most real thing i'd ever done in my life. and so i kept that sword in my hand, until it was just fused there, hacking away without me even trying.

and then one day, one sudden evening, the sword dropped from my hand because there was nothing left to chop away. i was empty. there was none of me left. of course, for a day or a few days, the mental gymnastics tried to gather enough strength to mount another epic battle. but it was done. i was done. there was nothing left to fight.

and today - without having anything of my own, all of a sudden the entire world is available to me. i can play or pout or dance or fall silent, because they all arise and pass away like clouds and knowing that i am only empty sky means i can lay and daydream on the shapes and sizes of the clouds all day long.

my girl, my best girl in the whole universe, sits at her house and burns furiously, and sometimes passionately, and sometimes petulantly, and sometimes morbidly and sometimes with colossal, unfathomable beauty. and i want to say to her that it's all perfect, that she is being drawn home. but she knows that already. she's the one who taught that to me.

so this is just a little dialogue from open space, from capacity into empty space.... a bit of high tech cheerleading to my favorite person, doing the only thing around that matters at all.