I have been on an epic journey. I have travelled a countless distance and endured unmeasurable inflictions. This is my story. It began with a breath I learned to sit with the breath and discovered great subtleties of silence. In time these places of bliss became distracted by moments of tension. I tugged on the thread. At the end of the tension was a discomfort, small and ambiguous. It was a...
I have faced the dragon. I have seen the ocean that drowns. I have seen the fires that consume. I have walked and been suffocated and been burnt. Beneath the waters and the flames I have seen the boulder that crushes. It is a wooden board with sharp corners and rough edges, and a solidity that won’t fail. It is a room that shrinks and shrinks until the prisoner is crouching and caught. It...
There is an anchor that weighs down the left side of my body. I am torn. I wish to ignore it, force it to dissipate through sheer exclusion of awareness, until I am free of its burden (when I can float through walls and transform into fantastic shapes). I wish for things that contradict that repulsion. I wish to live in harmony with my being, so that I may avoid suffering. I wish to live in...
Weak and vulnerable. Rivers flowing behind the eyes, and in the chest a sea. And the sea is never full. An undulating surface. Depths and darkness and suffocating enclosure. A place that expands from the inside out, with walls that never move. Desperation and pity and collapsed possibilities. A flimsy coil of smoke rising from its own darkness, reaching and grasping. An abyss reflecting itself...
There will be no monuments to my battles. No records of my trials. No one will see the monsters I went out to meet. No one will remember their size or ferocity. Stepping into fear When I woke up the dragon was already there. I have woken up to so many mornings – days that end only to turn into another, growing into weeks, marking months – with a pain in my chest and a knowledge of...
The mind is a morass of sensations that fling themselves against the canvas, splattering their reception by laws of attraction and rejection. The observer may sit patiently, never being moved only moving, never seen only seeing, never the watcher and never the watched. Or the observer may be cast outside by the tremors and insistence of its subject matter. Forces of delight pull the observer...
A memory. I wake up and the dragon is already there. There are stab wounds in my chest; shards of fractured glass drifting in the circuits of my heart and invading its walls. Today there is a scratch marking my belly. It is deep in some places, and an admixture of acid and a heat that is hot but never warm. I don’t know if I woke the dragon up, but I have known – many times before...
To lift myself out of darkness I had to deal with the life that I had. My body was a prison, and my mind a prisoner who had memorized a schedule of submissions to avoid the electrified bars. I could sense my body’s dimensions in the points of pain that decorated my limbs and torso like chains of stretched glass encompassing countless minuscule cracks and burns. To move was to transform one...
There was a time when my body was a great anchor wrapped around my mind, and my mind a tired and hungry mole, hard of sight and seeking the light. I awoke without refreshment, acknowledging the pain and the persistence of time that demanded a whole day before another respite. Every night I would lay down my body to sleep without hope of respite, acknowledging the restlessness and paranoia that...
