Give
I've decided to start writing in this blog again; it seems a shame to put a stop to something that has gone on for quite a while. The impetus to fill myself with new experiences has come to a halt or an excruciatingly slow crawl. I feel as though my frozen interior has leaked out into the exterior world and can be blamed for the insanely cold weather this evening. My mind is closing, maybe it’s always been closed and it is by way of lies and reckless optimism that has kept me walking in circles well trodden with eyes cast perpetually upward, fixed to the frozen starry sky.
Silence is needed, silence is desperately needed. I know where to find myself now and that is what terrifies me. It's the fact that I am right here: I exist here now, it’s like looking for your glasses and you have already got them on. However, the fact that you've found yourself is not some beautiful, hippie, magical dream spawned from the constant drivel of new age ideology. No, it's horrifying, like looking for the fountain of youth in the desert and instead you find a broken beaker half full of piss. Indeed, if you "look into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you". I cannot salvage this broken self, it's too small, too insignificant, too obsessed with its own being to be anything other than a small cup of waste. It's only through its negation worth is found. Given this, I find worth through the negation of self searching and replacing it with the search for others.
Through being for others the self is left behind, not through some sort of navel gazing ritual but by constant self giving to others. As Thomas Merton said "All that is left of me is I AM". Silence is needed to pray for the ability to give myself away to others. ‘Others’ being people who are thirsty, hungry and dying, the marginalized. I do not have much of myself to give away, after all I am a cup of piss and who would want to drink that? Yet, in self giving I believe that a transformation takes place: piss becomes water and weakness becomes strength, a transfiguration of values transpires. It's only within the community and not by abstracting ourselves from it do we become something holy. Its not even a case of becoming holy, this state of being has always been there its just a case of discovering our ability to be selfless. Indeed, we achieve this by emptying ourselves through constant self giving. Yet, to find this ability to give, silence is desperately needed: within silence we find the ability to put the notion of self in our own hands and stretch out our arms so it can be lifted from us.