***
I spend too much time unsuccessfully telling my thoughts what to think. They don't decide what they do, they just do it. By attempting to ignore a thought, it only becomes all the more obvious. I'm listening to my thoughts and feelings and expressing them, and I feel incredibly calm, and content, and energetic. Sometimes the weight of cosmic responsibility collapses on me. I must turn that collapse into expansiveness. I am trying to, from within to without, the opposition of macro- and microcosms is increasingly meaningless from day to day. The transition from day to day has become increasingly arbitrary as I train my mind to be present in the singularity of momentariness. Words are just approximations of what feelings sound like. Art is just approximately what the experience of feeling and the feeling of experience look like. My mind has been shackled, but now my writing hand remembers how to be honest and channel all that dark energy into illuminating words, symbols on the paper. The last few years I forgot how to write for myself. I was writing with suspicion, and always the secrets and doubt remained, keeping the truth from myself for fear of discovery by others. It remained, pent up inside, piling up until there was no room left for new feelings. It's about time I cleared things out, internally and externally. Not being secure enough to even express myself in the one way that has always come most naturally... that would make anyone depressed. This feels amazing. I can quite literally feel pent up energy in my neck unknotting through the practice of writing these words. It is a warming, relaxing of tension around my ears where my skull meets my neck. It is an unusual sensation, but it feels good since the discomfort is just the tension draining out of my muscles. Now it is passing through my shoulders, unknotting the tangles between my shoulder blades. I never would have put together that not writing was cause the physical embodiment of my stress. I always assumed it was not exercising. But if I think about it metaphorically, I haven't been exercising my mind or my heart because I haven't been writing. I feel more balanced and relaxed in this moment than I have in years, and as I write this another knot of energy in my right shoulder unwinds itself and passes down my arm into my hand. I'm quite pleased to feel the tension in my back relaxing but I feel that it is happening slowly, and there is a lot of built up tension in there. About two years worth of pent up energy and emotional strain. Why do I always deny myself the pleasure of writing from my heart? In writing and art even pain becomes beautiful through creative expression. Pain is constructive, positive through its capacity to reveal beauty. That is the utility of art, to present ways of seeing beauty that are not always apparent. I had somehow narrowed my expressiveness to such a small portion of how I experience this reality that I forgot how real all those other feelings and experiences are. I am positive that I will sleep restfully tonight, and will dream easily. It is so much easier to just write what I'm thinking instead of thinking in circles about what I am thinking. Better to get all the thoughts out so there will be room for new ones to come in. I feel as thought a drain has finally been unclogged and I am no longer sitting in a tub of tepid, filthy water. All the unclean particles have been washed off, so I can drain and wash the tub so it will be clean for the next time I need to wash my brain out. All of these unexpressed thoughts have been obscuring my vision so much I could hardly distinguish what all the words on all the papers I wrote were supposed to mean. I'm saying what I mean now. My heart is in someone else's care. I am terrified by being out of control of it, and at the same time it is liberating to not have to mind it myself. I know it is safe; I just don't know how much attention, how much love is being shared with it. I sometimes feel that its caregiver resents his responsibility and neglects it, but that he also realizes its vulnerability, paying it enough tenderness so as not to inadvertently injure it. It's simply too vulnerable to be transported around. I suppose the place where my heart is right now is its true home, in the place and with the person that facilitated its coming into being, its reincarnation, when its wounds were filled with gold and closed with golden stitches, and forever watched over by my third eye, a wide-open sparkling green iris... and finally sealed with a reverse S, the mirror image of my Self. I can't bear to ask for it back, because it isn't worth the risk of harm. But I know he feels its beat. My magic is real to those who know how to recognize it, and I feel he does even when my thoughts doubt him. And I must ultimately obey my feelings, because they are true no matter how I might rationalize them. My heart is out of my hands, and I must obey them, obey his touch.
