What scares me now…

What scares me now…

Peaceful after two weeks on retreat, I sit in a familiar coffee shop, and feel a stirring of fear in my belly at the prospect of flying back to London. Returning to a place and life that so often hi-jacks my serenity with its tyranny of to-do lists and goals not yet accomplished.

Will I forever sit in this unanswered question of how to sustain my retreat-self tranquillity and do it all with joy and ease? I fear those tight layers of restriction that shackle themselves so subtly onto me when my face is turned against them. I fear that once again I will lose myself so deeply in the doing I will not wake again until my next Californian summer.

I chastise myself for my earthly weakness, my inner voice imperiously telling me how a life led from Being would look and feel. It is she who scares me most.

Because I know in my heart of hearts that just as I make way back to the city so will I return to the insane vortex of unconscious doing, over and over again, caught deep in its maelstrom of tortured currents. As one person swimming against that tide, I sense it becomes an impossibility not to. Not because I am weak and impossibly human, but because that Doing is the stone I cut my blade across; and if the stone were butter I would no longer be in the living.

Because, if there is anything that scares me now it is those voices of transcendence that proclaim they’ve cracked the code of living. Always men, I’m noticing now; and always voices that seem to me to lack a joy of living.

So, in response I may crack my whip of pleasure and tease transcendence out from it’s lofty ideals of inspiration. Because what scares me now is the quest to divorce the body, a pursuit I’d fairly mastered. A pursuit that I see now led me into tendrils of depression and anxiety about the point of even living.

Reason scares me now. Not because it is without its virtue but because its tyranny has guided me to leave that which I now want to matter most.

So, I know the doing of demands lies on wait on the baggage carousel of Heathrow’s Tuesday. I know it will instantly wrap itself around me squeezing each day of my newly acquired bliss from every cell of my water immersed limbs. But nothing is forever, a day passes to the next, and brings with it each fresh beginning. And some days I will rush and devour each minute with my doing; and then there will be days where the crash of ocean swell may guide my very being.