Simply Being | Simple Being

Tag: space (page 1 of 3)

Oil & Water

It is very interesting to be partnered with someone who envelops you in a neutral, uncompromising space.

Someone who neither adds fuel to your fire nor pours water on it, someone who supplies fertilizer in a silent manner and does not intervene during a bug attack. Here is someone who is perfectly capable of watching this house go up in flames simply because they trust the structure to prop itself up. Someone who doesn’t know the I of intervention (or interference).

I must say that all ideas of love and companionship have been clear blown out of the water at this stage… NO shared goals, no real interest in each other’s aspirations, no claim to the other’s successes or failures. People would say that this is clearly NOT a recipe for harmony! And yet it is simply that… By getting out of each other’s way, I suppose we have become the way for the other to walk on.

Love is very strange because it is so spacious and it has no colors, really. It is about sweet gestures, all meaningless, of course… and it also seems to be about aloneness.

So strange, I had no idea this was what it was all about.

Like attracts like, or a moth is drawn to a flame, or we are oil and water, never to mix with each other, always floating separate and together.

Flimsy Boundaries

I recall thinking a few years ago… Perhaps our skin, the only tangible boundary between us and the world is highly superficial, or permeable. The “brine” that exists outside our bodies swims within us, too. The air and smoke and microorganisms and invisible beings that permeate the space outside our bodies exist inside them, too. Same goes for the metaphorical space that’s filled with dreams, ideas, fears, disappointments et al. It is all-pervading, meaning it’s also within me, Lakshmi. So, my so-called mental/emotional space isn’t any more mine than it is anyone else’s. I suppose it’s like being in a swimming pool. The water is everywhere—it’s foolish to think you can get away from it.

It then follows that both this physical body and the egoic one (Lakshmi) are flimsy vehicles with nonexistent boundaries because space gets in EVERYWHERE.

Talk is Easy

“Don’t you feel that there is such a lot of chatter going on all the time?”
“Like you are surrounded by a bunch of chatty folks all the time?”
“No, it isn’t just that.”

Talk is easy, quick and cheap
You can talk through the day until the sun sets, and then all night long.
Start the chatter and careless banter as day breaks,
Then there is TV and talk radio, interviews and people holding forth endless opinions,
And the grocery store and yoga studio, salon and gym.

It is on Facebook and Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr,
We all have something to say, our voices count, our opinions matter.

Even when the voices have died down, the talk continues.

Unceasing, relentless, changing and evolving, yes.

“Let me speak, I have been silent so long
I want to share too, I have been quiet for years,
I would like for someone to hear me too.”

I wish it was quieter, I really do.

The World that Beckons

There’s a world that beckons inward,
A space of quiet, non-threatening, plain and clean

I started going there as a child, I think?
I felt non-judged, felt like myself
(Whatever “myself” meant at that point in space and time)

I thought everyone had this kinda place
Surely, everyone needed it?

It took me a while before I got it:
That space was my own, my gift, a place I crafted for myself, maybe before I was even born
For refuge, for respite, a place to sleep and dream and let the tears flow

I still go there
every day
It is my own

And I like its neutrality

As a child, I felt it welcoming
Now I appreciate neutrality even more

Walls are pale grey-blue
Air flows in and out
There are windows, but none really
I feel the sun, the light and warmth

I hear the water

Is it a beach? A silent forest? Atop a mountain?

Are those clouds floating by, misting over?

Birdsong, chai, sounds of silence.