artistic living | extraplorer

Maybe I reached the mid-point.

All hell broke loose anyway. Trained as I am to look for symmetries in literature, I look for the same symmetries in the stories of my own life.

Often there is a turbulence around the most important point.

Something is trying to break in or out and something else is resisting it.

It’s exhausting and my own choices will be the flap of the butterfly’s wings that make completion or collapse.

Or at least my own choices are all that I can affect personally; destiny, other people, circumstances are not for me to decide.

In the middle of the turbulence I must summon everything within me to hold steady to what I know is most true, most full of hope, most kind.

If I hold steadier than the resistance presses on me, the depth of something else will break through.

I will be past the mid-point.

I still may not know what the something else is until much later.

The turbulence will persist for some days.

Yesterday I collided with two deep forms of reality (amongst the swooshings of everything around me). Firstly, I felt lost. Writing this down in the middle of the day made me somewhat comically feel immediately found. Secondly I wanted to rest, but it was not the moment to rest. This did not have quite the same impact but it softened the fretfulness that I was experiencing between my longing to collapse and not being able to.

Earlier this summer I found myself staring at two stark truths; unavoidable and uncontrollable they were. Two things I long for but cannot simply procure.

There is something about deep reality (I make a distinction between that and the confusions of everyday life, a kind of reality of their own, but often too entangled with delusions to easily pick out the truth from the fictions) which is mysteriously comforting, even when unwelcome. It is freeing in a certain kind of sense because it will not suffer manipulation and is immune to control-strategies.

I am not sure exactly what I am doing with this insight, but in a way I somehow stay close to it, and it is strengthening me for the demands of the moment.