Self-Inquiry & Collaboration, pt. 1

Dear God, Dear Angels, Dear Guides,

I am lonely. There is loneliness, there is me, and there is the relational space between. 

And there is you, and there is a strange peace, a deep and settled stillness emerging from within this loneliness. It is an ultimate platform on which to rest, somehow - the space from which I will gaze out onto the world.

I have found a kind of patience with myself, for I know I am capable. I know I am able which, much to my dismay, means I know that 'I' am.

I as an entity, as a being unto myself, distinct.

And yet... not. Writing here, alone and indoors while outside the sun cooks down, (the knob of the Australian oven has been set to 'broil' today) the birds halfheartedly chirp and the wind seems nonplussed, blowing strongly as if to say "I'm wind, man... doesn't matter to me what temperature it is." ...writing alone and indoors now there is the tangible truth of isolation. My life is mine alone, and cannot be lived by anyone else. The innermost resonances of it cannot even be glimpsed by another, 'I' is a territory I alone am privy to. 

Sometimes I turn away, sometimes I avert my eyes and do my best to look everywhere but into this space because all I can see, for endless swaths of distance, is my own solitary figure stepping slowly out into the desert. 

There is a life for each of us to live, a life no one else can touch, smell, or even contemplate. It exists in a space beyond imaginings where the darkest and the lightest of you come together in sacred curiosity, a space that comes online whenever you begin to explore yourself with full presence. No one but you will meet you there. I feel that strongly now as I write this, and the truth of it grips me with a strange and gentle menacing exhilaration.

But that's not the whole story. In solitude I sit now, and in solitude will I get up from this place to meet others as they arrive into shared bits of space/time and we exchange whatever it is we exchange. But there's more to it than that. 

There's the necessity, the inevitability of the other... the many ways in which I do not become real until I am seen. Or, to be more precise, until I see that I am seen. 

You walk in, you meet me, we say hello, you sit down across from me and ask me how I am and I begin to speak about the pulses within me at that moment. You listen. (For the sake of this exposition, let's assume you listen.   ;-p   )

My life is enlivened and enriched as, as best I am able, I allow it to be reshaped in a shared space. As it is received by your being I relearn it - I see the difference between it's rather dampened, onedimensional expression in my private desert vs. the vibrant clarity it assumes as it is articulated and absorbed. 

Humility, I learn about humility. And gratitude. And a wide variety of other truths which are inaccessible from the truth of isolation. It is these other truths, these relational vibrations, which colorfully saturate my story as it is birthed into any shared space, no matter the language of the birthing. (Dance is nice... silent eyecontact is good too.)

My life is brought to life - sung to life, danced to life, laughed and cried to life. 

So am I alone? Yes. And no.

The saturating colors of the relational space themselves would not be the whole story either, because without the original substance there would be no alchemical reaction - without lead there is nothing to turn into gold. Neither of these truths is the whole story.

I am alone, and my isolation is what affords me the joy of union. I have an 'I,' I have a life of my own with which to bridge the gap between us and meet you.

Without the desert of solitude, I would have nothing to offer the goddess of lovemagic. My isolation is my sacrifice - the more intensely brittle I allow the the truth of my separation to be, the more brilliant the inexorable constellation of communion becomes. It never ceases to astound me, how powerful the action of surrendering to love is.

We lay ourselves down when we surrender to love, we give ourselves over to a total dissolving. The more pure our journey into the desert of self-inquiry has been, the more transformational the dissolution of true collaboration will be. 

I explore myself so that I may relinquish myself. I investigate the truth of my singularity over and over again so that someday I may emerge from my desert with something truly worth laying down on altar of love.

No one else can do it for me, and I cannot do it alone.