Making the most of it I try to string together words to make some shared meaning, to try and communicate my feelings to you. Why does this seem to plague me so much? It haunts me, a floating sceptre hovering behind my rationality; always there.

And yet not. On examination there is nothing there. This is madness.  No question. Not the madness of manic antics, of deep holes and commanding voices, but the madness of knowing. The insanity of knowing too much, knowing that none of what we do makes sense. The more I try, the more confused I become, the further I take myself away from my centre of peace.

I am distracted and in being so I have forgotten why I entered the room. Now as I gaze at the still blank faces I know. I know I am not alone in this madness. Thankfully there are others congregated here who feel the disjuncture.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

I have forgotten so much, by choice or not it doesn’t matter. So much of who I was, what I experienced; the detail, the circumstances, the being is gone.

Yesterday I remembered a fear; a feeling of discomfort in a social gathering. The urge to run, to hide myself in a corner.

Yesterday I remembered the back doors, back pages; stories that used to keep me occupied, the stall no longer vacant, red-eyed from reading in the dark, finally falling asleep over the edge of a bank, hidden from view. I never wanted to go there, it always seemed to be someone else’s idea.

That was my dilemma. This is my tug-of-war, the battle between the world behind my eyes and the world out there.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

You want the truth?

then welcome to my nightmare,

a living hell of self-consciousness,

except … in those moments

of drug induced clarity

of meditation managed emptiness.

Never alone, completely alone

even now I feel the other’s hand

guiding mine.

Sparking the nerve endings, brain to body.

But you are there before that.

You, the other are before me,

before the brain and the body.

You, the other are there

here with me, the one.

Many eyes upon one,

rarely is it an even contest,

rarely am I in this position,

of having some equality, some equilibrium,

some equanimity.

Now, alone, empty, without value

am I close to you.

Close to engaging with you on equal terms.

We are togther in an endless moment

as we huddle close I feel the magic

that comes from being with you.

This is the substance of death.

This is the perfect timeless moment

within which there is simply silence.

No other, no self, no one, no contest.

No me to be seen. I am without substance.

I have gone.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x

Writing comes easily, it always has. I was raised to worship the word as written, as God. Writing was the road to salvation. It was the ultimate form of expression, of transmission. It was the means by which we could find our way through to the heart of darkness. I was taught to form symbols and meaning from the strokes of black on white.  My father showed me how to form the necessary symbols; my mother encouraged me to inform.

I was blessed with a fertile mind, an active mind. A blessing that meant I had plenty of material from which to form my words. My mind never shut off, there was always something there, something forming, reforming, leaping and sweeping, demanding space to move. This blessing soon become a curse, as I too quickly fell behind. My hand could not keep pace with that which moved it.  By the time I was six, the backlog had begun. Words unformed festered in my head, becoming mishappen and mashed together, they soon formed an amorphous seething black mass.

I tried my best to ease the beast inside. I scribbled and scrawled, doodled and drafted, and yet I never rid myself of that backlog. The seething mass just kept getting bigger and darker and more demanding. I tried, and the more I tried the more I seemed to fail. All I managed were moments of temporary relief through an expulsion of built up vocabulary onto the page in front of me.

What I saw there only disheartened me more. My words made no sense.  Their mutant shape while  recognisable to me, were alien to any others who saw them.  They were not pretty, they emerged from me squashed and pummelled. I had no time it seemed to nurture and nourish them after their birth, for there were always so many others, mangled and maimed, yearning to be set free.

For so many years I have lived in this agony. A narrow neck, a choked canal.

 So why do it?

Because it is what I am meant to do. I realise that now. It is not about making sense. It is not about finding an audience. It is not about anything other than this, simply this. Writing words is what I’m meant to be doing.

Some people are talkers, others have a healing touch, others still are affectionate and demonstrative in their love. I am all these things in part, yet none of these things come as naturally or as easily as the recording of my mind.

And I need to keep practising. I need to keep sitting in front of the page and writing what I am. For when I am not, I am distracted by the voices in my head. I am distracted through attachment and investment. When I am not writing I am caring; caring about whether I make sense, caring about whether I am making a good impression, caring about whether I am fully in this moment or not, and what the next one might be.

x bhavatu sabbe mangalum x