Day 65 Isolation

A long time ago, someone called me a "wordsmith."  At the time, I took it for a compliment, and it was intended as such.

Today, however, I don't feel like much of a wordsmith.  In fact, crafting words together into something with meaning seems as far away as Jupiter.  

Who am I kidding? What right do I have to call myself a writer, or anything having to do with smithing words together to make something meaningful and whole and intuitive and illuminating?

There are days when I feel like I am doing everything I can to just tread water. Days where I feel like I am occupying one tiny part of the world and the things I do make no difference in the lives of others.  It's almost like space and time and age and location don't exist, that it is all just some sort of dream world I've conjured in my mind, a place that my thoughts and spirit have gone to in order to escape.


Escape what?

I don't know. Just to feel the nothingness of no responsibility, to only be my thoughts (let them be good), or to experience something outside my thoughts. I've read about reality transurfing (Vadim Zeland) and found it to be highly intellectualized when I think this otherness is something else altogether different.

The thing I like the most about the nothingness is the solitude and the quiet.  Even now, sitting at my desk, I can hear the refrigerator, I can hear my keyboard clacking away, I can hear house sounds. There are precious few places where it is quiet, and fewer still where there is silence.

This is, in part, why silent meditation is so important. We do need a chance to unplug and just be with ourselves and if we believe in god, to be with our god. We need to have the quiet to recharge, to think about good things larger than ourselves and especially to take the opportunity to be quiet.

Our everyday lives are so busy and there are many times I believe the busyness is just busy-work.  We run around because we don't know how to just be, and especially just be with ourselves. Life is bigger and smaller than the next football game or who wins the March Madness play-offs.

We need to live lives that count in small ways that trickle into a stream and then a creek and then a river that impact people around us.  I think in order to do so in a meaningful way we need to take

the words of Jesus, "Love your neighbor as yourself," and find the practical application. Not lip service to a good idea, but to take care of yourself physically and spiritually in such a way that you are loving of yourself (setting boundaries, forgiving yourself for your shortcomings, being kind) and then taking that good, positive sort of self love into the world to make the small differences that merge with countless other small differences to make a significant impact.

We need to be in community with our neighbors and those neighbors are the people that live next door to us. that are in cubicles in our row, the people who have worked year in and year out at the grocery store and that we interact with on a regular basis.

Yes, there are days I'm treading water. It's not such a bad thing as long as it isn't permanent. Eventually, I need to move forward and I need to make my quiet and take intentional sanctuary in that quiet. Then I am able not only to love myself, but love others with words and actions.