Diving
This is my challenge with this blog: to blog when everything is perfect or when my thoughts keep me from the perfection that is always around me. Today falls into the latter category. After such a lovely essay of paradise, I find myself in a mental state that neatly barricades me from the happiness I can be. Hormones can only take so much blame. The rest I have to chalk up to the exploration of attachment and unattachment. I am firmly attached today, as much as a mollosk, as tethered as a barnacle stubbornly clinging to the underside of a boat.
I woke to write pensive poems, glare at the gorgeous sunlight, avoid mirrors, and all of those things I do when there is a chordae tendineae out of tune.
I threw everything at this mood. All of the Byron Katie (moments of peace!), the fantastical aquarium of dreams I swam in, the shoreline of Bali's volcanos in the distance, the delicious hot pizza I ate for dinner. Did it work? In a sense, yes. But there is still that ache of dis-ease working itself out in my thoughts, sometimes forefront and pouting, sullen, other times merely banished for a few precious seconds of coming up for air.
How does this happen? How can I be here, having this experience and have such a bad seed rooted in my chest? How can I have had the learning of the last few months only to recycle the old list of wrongs and ills, rail against non-existant people and crimes I occasionally revist on myself? Is this the chance to finally put one of those aside? Is this the day where I burn off that pain in the hot sun of Indonesia? Change my time to pagi, so-re, and malam and lose that past that rises up to swallow my happiness whole?
No, not today. Basok. Tomorrow. Or tomorrow's tomorrow. The idea of island time neatly encapsulated in one work, Basok. It means tomorrow. But a loose tomorrow. That tomorrow when I finally get it right, buy that ticket home, pay my taxes, find a peace that can stretch out into the basok.
Learning experience? Maybe. Running through the myriad of potentially worst outcomes and having it all subside into a reality that is much kinder is quite the lesson. Still being unwilling to let go of that worst outcome? A lesson in the gentleness of now and the inflexibility of my thoughts to allow for that graceful space in which to surface, mola-mola style to the sun and shake off the parasites that have me iching in paradise.
Guess we'll see, eh?