the habit of being

Some may believe that great suffering is simply melodramatic and religious, but honestly great suffering is at the heart of what life is. I have suffered unbearably and I have wrought unbearable suffering upon others, and in our bearing it out, we have stayed alive. To live this way is to have emotion, and our varied emotions are simply a rainbow projection of suffering through the prism of the mind.

(In my writing, I like to single out emotions. Single emotions are monochrome, they don’t paint the whole picture and they don’t capture the whole scope. I say I am not these words. I say I am not as good as they are and I am not as bad as they are. I say I am beyond this as I am beyond these motions I carry myself through day by day. I say I am beyond these violent outbursts, these wails and cries, and writing is nothing if not an act of violence against a serene blankness, an innocent page. Writing is a scream in the dark. I say all this in my own defense, when I find myself writing of my own cruelty and anger instead of the cruelty and anger inflicted upon me.)

What we call spirituality seems often to be a practice of taming our passions, leveling our heads, calming our cries and wails, reducing ourselves to the simple breath. But what if in truth even to breathe is to wail and cry? What if in aspiring to perfect unattainable stability we are denying all that is divine in us?

(Love is violent, and everyone writes about love! There is one rule: Record only what is true. And yet So much is true. Different perspectives hold different truths. Everything is transient. Today’s cruelty is tomorrow’s adoration. My life is a testament to this. I do not even understand trust anymore; did I ever? I trust that things change and that people are flawed.)

I have often wondered what beauty is. I have written about it and asked and given up. Out of spite, I told someone once not to confuse sadness with beauty. But maybe that is just it - sadness is beauty. Suffering is beauty. Either It is all low or It is all high. It is all the same. Freedom is not about moving beyond melodrama, it is about embracing it and realizing that these moments of great intensity - great puking awful realization that life is horrid and we ourselves indescribably cruel - these nauseous moments are the children of enlightenment.

Maybe It will never be easy. Maybe It will never be simple. We have all these spiritual terms we cannot define. Maybe we cannot define them because they do not exist. The moment is all that exists. In the moment, we are victims and we are murderers and we are divine. We are the energy that ignites the sobs, the wails, the love.

(I see a girl hunched up on the floor talking to a boy and there is nothing I can do for her. There was nothing anyone could do for me. We sleep our lives away in huge chunks, we work and fuck and dance. We suffer and go on. There is nothing else to do. Certainly, there is nothing else to say.)

If suffering is beauty, then maybe to move beyond beauty - to get over it already, to let go of it - is to move beyond suffering.