One thing I've gotten much better at in the last two years is my ability to feel bad. I'm much better at not fighting it anymore, and I realize that my obsession with comfort and feeling good is much worse for me than feeling sad, angry, lonely, or stupid. But all of this time alone makes me feel all of these things fairly regularly. Teaching is a great way to avoid feelings. You're never alone when you teach. The feeling I have now reminds me of what Pema Chodron says about meditation: once you clear away all of the boring clutter of your thoughts, what is revealed isn't necessarily sunshine and poppy fields. Instead there are a lot of rotting corpses and old gross junk that comes to the surface. All of this silence has brought some of this junk forward. It also makes me think of that demon that comes to the bath house in Spirited Away, the one who comes in all giant and dirty and disgusting, and then gets years and years worth of junk pulled out of him--trash and bicycles and crap--and then turns into a wispy spirit that flies away. I'm not really at the wispy spirit stage yet. I do find that meditating makes it easier for me to feel bad. But it doesn't make me feel better.
I think the poem is turning into a junk-clearing exercise. I've been writing it for almost two years, though I didn't really write much for about a year. It's entered a new phase, not really based on anything external at all. Maybe it's about trying to balance my internal and external worlds. I'm living in a time where so many things I encounter feel like huge metaphors for existence. Everything feels like a freaking metaphor. With so many metaphors surrounding me, I'm not really sure why I even write. The universe is one big poem. I do acknowledge that I don't really need to write. I do feel driven to create though. And I don't want to have kids. In feng shui, creativity is synonymous with children and childbirth. When did I become so New-Agey? Lord have mercy.
I might want to start writing here on a regular basis again. This is boring and disorganized; hopefully I won't be such a loser in future posts. I feel like I don't really know how to communicate with people anymore; I spend most of my hours alone, not even really talking to myself. This should make for interesting teaching, should I teach again.
