2024-11-01 Journal Entry

In El Salvador! 🇸🇻

What’s going on today. Got a good sit in. I feel fairly self-conscious sitting here journaling near Dan and Tania, but so it goes. Since I’ve got free time now – and in some ways it’s the “beggining of the end” re: work – I’m trying to be more bullish about actually doing this thing every day.

Quote of the day: “light cone of possibility”

I was trying to describe to Dan the difference between wilfulness and willingness, and how willingness is basically the things that one is willing to do, e.g. the things within the realm of one’s awareness or that could be brought to one’s attention; and that wilfulness is the concerted effort towards one or another of those possibilities.

We’re just sitting here in the dark, and it’s kinda lovely all just sitting here quietly. Tania’s writing and taking care of some random stuff, Dan is on his phone in his orange sunglasses that give me so much life, and I’m over here word-vomiting.

I got a good 45 minute sit in today, which was quite excellent. Well, not quite excellent, but I was glad to have gotten something in. The sit was kinda interesting in that I did notice something Rob Burbea talked about, which was this occasional lull before really diving into moments of concentration. I had a good five or 10 minutes of feeling really dull, where I just couldn’t quite get things to come together, and then all of a sudden it was a deep dive. The walls pulled apart, the bottom fell out, and everything was there.

I do love being here with friends, but I also do get a very strong sense that a place like this would also be very nice solo. The language barrier may be a bit of a problem – I’m just so bad at navigating language barriers still – but the overhead of coordinating people like this is always something that I’m so aware of.

Tania asked me how my love life is, and I didn’t really respond well, so I’m trying to take a moment to reflect on it. I always feel bad about it, but my love life is like the Mad Men meme: I don’t think about you at all. And I feel bad about that: sometimes I conjur up these images during meditation or whatever where I feel into memories and recollections of the feeling of romantic love. And it’s amazing! I don’t really have any specific negative connotations with it. I feel into it very positively: there’s something particularly noble about romantic love, such an extreme externalizing force of care for another. Infatuation is also a part of it, to love a person so incredibly deeply.

But I also don’t really miss it or yearn for it. If it were to come it would be beautiful. But it also comes with it a certain consent to suffering, a consent to lay down oneself at the feet of another and to bear their burdens as if they were yours. I think that notion may actually rub certain people the wrong way, that that may sound unhealthy or what have you. But I do think it’s a hallmark of love, that life feels so unbearable without them that we’d rather end the heartache upon their death than to continue on. Old couples have that happen quite often, honestly; young ones too – I remember a time when Nhyta considered dropping out and moving back to Chicago, and I found the idea unbearable. Of course that feeling may mellow with age, but it also refines.

And so too do the other facets of love refine themselves with age. All emotions do. They become less rigid and enter into the heart more freely. As Beth said a while back, we learn to greet (and see them off) as friends. They’re intolerably lovely, too much for our hearts to really take.

I think so often of that C.S. Lewis quote about the unbearable secret in us, that which we call beauty and leave it at that, too ashamed to describe something more. Even the mundane inspires that, to me. I described above my sense of awkwardness about writing in the midst of others, but that’s largely faded now. The room is dark, the distant sound of waves audible only to the attentive, and I want dearly to walk out on the grass and see if the stars are up. The stars not around but among them.

So now I feel I have little to say. What indeed is worth saying right now. The mind is quiet and still, letting me tenderly poke and prod at its inner workings like a trusting dog on the vet’s table. (What a silly metaphor it just arove at!) And in some ways writing still feels nourishing, despite having little to say.

By now I’ve been writing for 20 minutes or so, and the words come and go. Words as dharma practice, as little marks on a page. Words as paintings, doves, the gentle caress of a lover’s hair.

Everything is teaching us, everything is dharmas to be recieved. Everything is a refuge.

Even the boredom, even the uncertainty, the tanha, the pain and love and stars of the firmament are dharmas worthy of deep prostrations.

May all beings be free.