to overcome dread.

dear friends,

I proximate my darkened thoughts and bring them to light.

We enter a new space, a new empty slate: the blank void once more. On every pass, I find anew my self and soul. I am forged; enforced forgery of froggy fogs jumping about in nonsense, keen to my own senses: these noises and sounds I may mistaken for signal. What do you make of this, my friend?

I approximate my map and only have my compass to rely on. What compass do you rely on, if any? How would you approximate your mind, heart, and soul?

I don't mean to get so personal and intrusive, I am genuinely curious as to what you feel, what you think, what you experience. We have no means (that I know of) of jumping into one another's mind. We all inevitably must confront the void of mind staring at us on each new day, when night falls.

Do you hear the birds at night?

Don't let the boid, the void, devoid of meaning take you into despair for too long. Find the camp fire in the wetted greened leaved forest. Find hearth in heart. Desperately, search for it, through the darkened forest of the mountains. Search for your way through. Get lost. Find lostness. Let go. Break off. Disintegrate.

In those moments of collapse, you will yearn for the warmth of the fire. You will yearn for home. You will yearn for belonging. There is no telling how long the cold will last. But hold on to your yearning. Hold on to your core. Don't let it shape you. You shape you. What shapes do you form in your void of mind?

Let ash burn.

your friend(ly),

jakester

main aim: how to deal with dread.

It occurred to me in a blur, as if Time itself folded inwards and out. A slip, a pause, a moment of reprieve. A break away from the Spirit of the Times. One second is all it took to take me, to reset. An encounter with the unconscious?

What led up to this?

I arrived to the gym approximately fifteen minutes early in my van. It was 2:31pm when I checked my phone. I was distraught, overwhelmed, bitter. I was caught in a nasty feedback loop recursively cursing me. The whole drive down from the north, these past four to six hours, were Hell.

No matter what thought path I attempted to walk (ie. "I am an awareness of my thoughts; I am not my thoughts.") to detach from these deep negative emotions, were failing me. I could not make sense of my worth. Soft-spoken and reserved in my social interaction, my energy was low. I was doing my best to get by. These four to six hours felt like twenty. I tried sitting in silence as traffic on the highway passed me by. I was caught in my fire once more.

Static and noise. Static and noise blocked my mind. I wanted to clear it, dispel it away. To create a blank space, blankness. Yet, I could not shake it, this static and noise. All around, engulfing me.

2:32pm. I have decided to lay in the hammock, my red hammock, in silence. I set a timer for 9 minutes and 3 seconds. At 2:45pm, I was supposed to work out with Chris. 9 minutes and 2 seconds.

I lay in my hammock, rocking back and forth. Questioning myself. Questioning my questions. Feeling the pressure. What pressure? Taxes? Really? It's just money, after all. I try to detach.

…

I sat in my own essence.

A return to blankness. I meditated, focusing on breathe, my breathe.

I was a cocoon, how corny! Butterfly Boy trying to find joy once more! Trying to find Peace. Peace in the Day. Peace, here and now.

Meditative thought. In hammock. Black. Swing.

A state of sleep and andromeda. A "half-wakened, half-sleep state" I fell into.

It's hard to have patience when it feels the world is impatient to you. Have patience. Breathe. Confront. See. Dread. Breathe. A state of oscillation.

It only took a second, a quick frame of black blankness. The alarm went off. All 9 minutes and three seconds. Lucid. I received a text from Chris. It was 2:41pm. I felt a strange sense of calmness overcome me. Did I fall asleep?

I felt I was in an in-between state. Between conscious and unconscious thought and presence. Time hastened and folded. I felt myself swinging in the hammock. I felt awake. I slipped thru it, thru Time itself, it felt.

One second of blankness.

I am confident such occurred, a state of in-between. I was conscious, I thought. Void, vacuumed of static and noise. I recollected myself. I try to recollect the experience, to recall the images I saw in flashes. There's nothing but blankness. Meditative thought. A state of nothingness.

A state of non-self. A state of detachment. Even just for a brief second. All I needed. Jest a second.

The Dialectic between Master and Slave, between Man and Shadow, live consistently within the space of my mind. Without the shadow, there is no man. Recognition and self-consciousness.

to perform, to create, to live: what comes first?

The Chicken, the Egg, the Rain Drop, the River, the Rain Clouds. On the great field of consciousness, we wonder what came first to explain our existence, our stream of thoughts, our dreams of emotions.

Appearances, perception, deception, on conception. There is no telling what comes first. Without a slave, there is no master. Without a master, there is no slave. Without good, there is no evil. Without evil, there is no good. Without a shadow, there is no soul. Without a soul, there is no shadow.

The shadow serves the man as the man serves the shadow. There is no escaping, no avoiding. Only confrontation. The shadow appears in our perception. You cannot deceive your own conception.

Compassion. Perspective. Awareness. Dance. In oscillation, in contradiction, comprehending the incomprehensible. You do all three and none at all. All for one. One for all.

"Neither good nor evil shall be my master."

I travel the "hot-cold" path.

My eye keeps twitching, on this rotful day. The worse of me continues to reign, to rain over me. I grow sick of myself. A phone call: she picked me up on this rotful day [12:15AM]. She called me, a heart full of years with a nose snifled atick. What timing, I obsessively thought. She saved me from this rotful day.

Her love, reminds me, how loved I am. I am loved. I am love. I am not my thoughts.

MIND THE GAP!

In the wistful whispers of the night sky, the stars align. "Human emotions are but invisible threads: only one has to pull to make them move."

She pulled my strings, a jolt of spring. The autumn leaves have not even made way to the grounds. How abound!

Abound I am at a moment's notice full of serotonin. No longer blocked, I feel a release. Love and devotion, not an illusion. I devote my life to her. She cried from an imagined future of my early death.

Merely a vessel for love to pass through: how lucky I am to take witness. A vessel full of perspective, I am a flowing river. May love continue to flow, no matter how slow!

MY BODY, I GIVE!