I've travelled to Boulder, CO for a few days - had wonderful visits with a few friends in the area and then replicated the cross-country drive with Bradford and Uhaul trailer in tow between Boulder and Franconia; this time Bradford's stuff in the trailer as he brought to a close a chapter of his life in Colorado and joined me for some living in New England.
I've also celebrated my 40th birthday with the brilliant and beautiful women of North Country Shelter and then journeyed to Ontario with Bradford and Ben to celebrate many October family birthdays with the folks across the border. Wowee.What else? I'll write the NCMHCE for both NH and VT state licensing requirements next week down in Concord. There's a good chance I won't pass. Then again, anything can happen.
My life with Ben is breathtaking. I'm simply smitten. My unfolding adventure with Bradford is pretty cool. We're shacked up which is fun. And not so much fun when it's cold and dark and neither one of us knows exactly what life holds in store for us.
What do I really want to say? I'm a middle-aged woman (I can say this now) who is unemployed, somewhat unfocused in her life's direction (at least professionally), with $9 in her bank account. As I walked with the dogs through the woods and trails this late afternoon, I was talking myself into being frank about this whole situation with whatever eyes come across this screen.
This life thing, it's an unwin-able endeavour. There is no 'logos' to which humans currently ascribe with any success. God, the search for meaning, religion, materialism, service, comfort, security, control, peace, enlightenment, knowledge, salvation, environmentalism. You name it, none of these forms can bring a sense of completion, rightness, nor ultimately be attained. Nailing jello to a tree. Not that we stop trying, as a collective humanity, however. And that's the insanity. To look for meaning, to grope for a handhold where there is nothing. Emptiness, no-thingness, the great Void, the Mystery. So many of us try to assign benevolence to the Mystery and emptiness. Then it wouldn't be empty - it would have an angle.
I see it as the ultimate joke. We just want something to hold onto. If it could be held, put into words, captured by the mind through thought and ideology, it would be a shoddy sham. Everything we can hold or aspire towards has a built-in self-destruction unit and man, it's gonna hurt when it dissolves or blows up and there we are, holding on for dear life. The joke is that we take our 'logos' so seriously. We take this dream of being a human so seriously. We take our stories so seriously and get so lost in the groping for and reinforcement of a false self that depends on our opinions, circumstances, and personal drama. Speaking for myself, I have taken this dream of being alive so seriously, and that's the sick and brilliant sense of humour of the Cosmos unfolding.
In my life I have had a lot of fear around being destitute, a failure, a floundering fool, incapacitated, out of control. At middle age and with $9 to my name, I'm meeting what once was my worst fear and I'm laughing like never before. If you're not laughing, afterall, you've gone to sleep in the dream and gotten lost in character. You've gone and made the fatal error of trying to lean into that which doesn't exist.
We are a crazy, crazy species. We will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid our fears of emptiness, meaninglessness. We will hide through seeking. We will sooner die than relinquish our all-precious beliefs. We will destroy life to hold onto a false-self. We would rather acquire more information than experience more truth. We will always draw to us new opportunities to wake up. This is grace.
Good luck.
