Simply Being | Simple Being

Tag: solitude (page 1 of 4)

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.

Corona Notes: Life, Inside

Wrote this a year ago on Facebook, and I thought I’d share it here as well.

The last couple of posts of mine have been… a little sombre, sober, sad. It is important to understand, though… they were written in a particular state of mind. And no state of mind is constant. This lockdown has also been a period of beauty, enthusiasm, loving joy, humor, even bliss. And there used to be a smidgen of guilt as well. For not contributing, for not sewing masks, for not supporting, for not donating, for not volunteering, for not being enough… in any way, in many ways.

Not that any of this is a competition. And I have never been a good competitor. I hardly ever feel invested in an end goal, a final prize… not even myself. This idea of doing something/anything as a means to become more evolved, more benevolent, more generous, more wise… doesn’t fully gel with me. I AM evolved, benevolent, generous and wise. I am also fearful, anxious, stubborn, and detached. And everything I do emerges from this unique, multi-colored space.

I have enjoyed this lockdown period immensely but I have also been rattled in strange, little ways. I have experienced dull evenings of scary, gaping emptiness, and I have savored blissfully cool, sunny mornings when my garden smiles back at me, and little seedlings happily unfurl their true leaves on the bathroom window sill. I have happily eaten every dish my creative husband has rustled up in our kitchen. I have had rough nights with dreams of chaos, restlessness. And then there is that rare morning when you wake up feeling weightless, so light and transparent, like a feather.

(I tend to believe that a LOT of how I feel is directly linked to the state of my digestion. So I attend to it as best as I can.)

My husband is a beautiful mirror, meaning he reflects what he sees without projecting. When you are a “blank canvas” type of personality, it is immensely helpful to have a partner who doesn’t splatter paint all over you. Perhaps that’s why this period of forced enclosure has not altered the quality of space in the relationship.

Contrary to what anyone (friend, partner, parent, media, president, prime minister, queen) says, our experience of life is fully and unequivocally our own, and it is an internal phenomenon. Life actually occurs on the inside, so no one can tell you what THAT is all about, and that includes the pandemic/Corona experience also.

Better Half/Whole Pie

Sometimes you are the better half, and then you are the whole pie, and then you feel like you are missing THE better half, but the missing is all-sweet, nothing sad or bitter about any of it, and parting/meeting is a bit like waves rushing to the shore, then pulling away. We meet in silence and we meet in celebration, we inch ever so close, even closer… and yet we are universes apart. Love is never complete because there are two halves to the pie. And yet it feels that I am the dreamer who dreamed him up. And he is pure camphor, leaving no traces behind. And it is I who dreamed him up, swallowed him whole, and all his traces are in me alone.

Video: Morning Pages

Here I am talking about “Morning Pages,” an exercise created by writing coach Julia Cameron for artists, writers, and anyone who struggled to express themselves creatively. I have a slightly different angle to the exercise. I view it as a meditation on paper, a tool that helps clear away lingering thoughts and emotions, “cleans our mental/emotional landscape,” so to speak… So that we can begin the day clear, creative, and free.

I have been doing Morning Pages for a couple of years now.

When I taught meditation, one of things I reminded participants was “anyone can meditate.” Similarly, I feel that anyone can do Morning Pages.

In these times of stress and uncertainty, Morning Pages is a beautiful exercise of space, solitude, letting go and breathing out.