Form is emptiness. And emptiness is form.

What are the stories you tell yourself in order to live? What happens when these stories become fixed narratives - lived out like capital T truths? It’s hard to know what is ever right or wrong, good or bad or the utility of dichotomous descriptions of experience. I want to tell this a bit through the lens of the personal - the “eye” or the “I.” Although, I acknowledge in telling this, I am also a collection of mirrors trying to get back to some organic essence of me before I came into contact with Objects.

I think for me, a consequence of this storytelling has been a kind of estrangement from my life. Being wounded without even knowing this is what is taking place. It’s so incredibly easy to lose the moment. To fall back into something that protects against closer contact with the raw material - those parts of me that I have sent to the edges of awareness that may help me recover my actual humanity. The secret inside my flesh that holds my vulnerability - my weakness, my inadequacy, failures, dependency, need and a litany of experiences that undermine some ideal I have taken on in the form of story because in order to be a self; I tell myself I need consistency; I need form. So my heart yearns for this, spiraling into control. And I become more and more incapable of revealing my wounds. So, how do I grieve these rejected and shadowed parts of my life - how do I welcome the unlived life? How do I walk through a graveyard of loss with my eyes open? How do I embrace the fertile void of emptiness? How do I make a door through which I can generously greet the stranger that dwells within? I want to take pity on this seemingly naked and ravenous form - and I wonder to myself - maybe he feels something similar toward me. Either way, this secret interior is a reminder of choices made that may have harmed others and also myself. Neglected dreams; relationships that were not attended to; the heavy sadness of regrets. All of this yearning for the soft hands of compassion quieting the inner terrain of conversations fed by narrow stories. How can I grow the kindness and mercy I need for this kind of journey? I know my grief can be a powerful solvent for this; a kind of alchemy helping me through places of starry darkness - touching even the hardest parts of my heart. Maybe here, when I let the weight of stories and form down - when I abandon all hope in “something” and feel the mattering of my losses - come closer to noticing and leaning into all that is me and all that is not me - the worth of feelings that take the form of flowing water and warmth, pressing up against closed eyelids; flowing over and through. The stark limitation of language to capture what the body can open to, can hold, can defend against, and can witness.

Life rushes over all of this in a relentless kind of way - both anonymously and loud. How to be soft and permeable and trusting and close and generous and formless. Such a mystery. And maybe that is an emerging brand of story - beholding what is left of me to the biggest kind of mystery; wearing me down (up?) until I become like those campfires blinking some kind of way in those imperfectly, beautiful and rich onyx Idaho late autumn skies.