Moving On

Aaaahhh. The last night in my house as a single inhabitant. Tomorrow Alan moves in, and I begin the journey of living with a roommate. It seems like exactly what needs to be happening in my life right now.

Alan is an ideal roommate, I think. We know each other pretty well, but aren't best friends. Less likely to drive each other crazy, I think. Also, we have been communicating very well as this whole process has come about. I hope that will continue, so that we can both live happily in this small-ish space. Also, best of all, Alan loves Friday kitty like no other. Other than me, of course. Honestly, though, if I were to die, I would want Alan to take Friday - it is a perfect match. And having a scenario where Friday kitty gets even MORE love than he does now is really great!

The poor little guy is probably very confused right now. He spent the evening under my bed as I steam cleaned the carpets. The only thing worse than the noise of a vacuum cleaner is a steam cleaner! And Friday HATES the vacuum. I hate it that he has been hiding like that, but he's surely in the quietest, safest place for him while all that noise is going on. What will he do tomorrow when I steam the carpets in that room, I wonder? For now, he has come out of hiding, and is wandering around the house, rubbing his soft body against the endless stacks of stuff. How's that for making friends with chaos? Oh, my little Buddha cat, teaching me yet another piece of transcendental wisdom. =)

I'm told that tonight there will be a major meteor shower, and I wish I had the stamina to stay up and stare at the sky. But it's getting cold out, and I got up at 6am to go to DC by 9am, and then taught flute lessons, and then spent the whole evening cleaning my carpets. I'm pretty much beat about now. Maybe I will go crawl up on the roof for a little while and commune with the sky and some sacred tobacco.

It hit me tonight as I was sitting on the toilet that I am getting used to living without Familiar kitty in my life. And I spoke those words to him, as if he were with me. I kind of feel his presence there with me in the bathroom where he died sometimes, and it doesn't freak me out as much as it did a few weeks ago. I miss him still, and I feel like my life will never go back to the way it was before. But I am starting to feel that my life is going on in spite of the sorrow. And of course it does, of course it must. Sometimes I think that that is the hardest part...knowing that life does go on in spite of the pain and suffering of loss. It almost feels like it shouldn't - it's not fair to go on living without the ones I love! But I also can acknowledge that thinking like that just brings more suffering. All I can do is breathe into the pain and watch as my own life lives itself beyond that dark shadow that death has cast upon my heart.

Feeling Lost

I don't like spending time with the dark parts of myself. I am a being who is usually very much drawn to the light. I'm not talking about day and night here, but inner realms and experience. I am not drawn to negativity, pessimism, depression, or hopelessness. Not that I don't experience them in my life, because surely I do. But I am naturally drawn to joy, optimism, love, and effervescence. Angela "Blueskies" is hugely fitting to the state of being that is most natural to me. But it's been quite a while since I inhabited those states of being on a regular basis. My name right now may as well be Angela "Thundercloud."

Anger has been barging its way into the hopelessness and sadness these last few days. At first, I thought it was coming along with my cycle, the usual anger and aggression that often accompany it. But this has lingered and intensified. There is a track in my mind that feels like a tiger, waiting silently, patiently to strike to kill anyone who crosses me in the slightest way. This part imagines confrontations, and imagines scenarios and outcomes that involve tremendous violence in words and actions. Now, I haven't been acting upon any of these scenarios, but I have been watching them, especially these last couple days. I haven't even seen any point in leaving the house. It seems that when I do, unbelievably frustrating things happen.

The question that has been a recurrent mantra in my mind has been "what is the fucking point of any of this?!" I feel like a hamster stuck on a wheel, or at least in a little shitty cage. But I KNOw that I'm that hamster, stuck on a pointless fucking wheel, inside a prison of a shitty cage, and I KNOW that there's more outside of it, and yet I can't seem to find the way.

I have experienced firsthand - in ceremony and in meditation and in community - the most incredible beauty in this world, in this life. I have felt the sublime power of love. I have felt held in the womb of Mother Earth. I have seen things I couldn't have ever believed, and felt things that called into question everything that I have ever known. And in spite of all of that, the death of Familiar kitty has marked life with a heavy darkness. And part of that darkness has disconnected me from those truths that come from living in the Light. I remember them as a novel right now...characters and scenes from a life that are bound to the page, yet not my own.

I posted a question on Facebook the other day: "What gets you out of bed in the morning?" The answers that I received were depressing beyond my imaginings. I also had included an aside to that question, "besides the alarm clock or coffee," hoping to suggest I was looking for the *meaning* of getting out of bed in the morning. Not once person who answered went there. The answers? The dog, the cat, the kid, hunger, needing to pee. And honestly, these are the things that I have been feeling in my life, lately, too. Never before have I felt like I got out of bed for food or a piss. I got out of bed because the light of day pulled my spirit into the world to LIVE. But right now, I am feeling that I, too, get up to eat, poop, and sleep again. And after living my life from a place of intense meaning and connection, living with these things as my drives is the most devastating thing I have ever known.

I cannot wake up in the morning and get out of bed if all there is to my life is eating, pooping, making money, and sleeping again. If that's all there is, then let me die right fucking now.

I already know, somewhere deep inside of me, that there is way, way more to life. But when I try to go there, it's as if I'm dumb or something. Like the part of me that knows that has been blocked off somehow. And yet the question, the longing remains. I know that a new pair of fuzzy boots is a great thing, but it doesn't give meaning to my day. Stuff doesn't give meaning to my day. Material things don't give meaning to my day. Their absence can be a pain in the ass, for sure - as it was tonight, when I discovered that the tape deck in my car no longer works, and that is what I use to play my Ipod - but that's not living and dying. It's a fucking tape deck. And the boots are fucking boots. I also know that getting rich and buying a fancy car and house won't give meaning to my life. It's just more stuff that might make me "comfortable" and make me feel "abundant" but it's essentially just more garbage.

What about finding a partner and having a family? While these things certainly do add some sense of meaning to life, undoubtedly, and provide some sense of structure to daily living that is rooted in living communally, when it comes down to it, unless the deeper meaning of life is clear first, these things just become another path toward material living. Getting the right stuff for the couple, getting the right stuff for the kid. And good god, raising a kid in a material paradigm? That makes me want to die, too...

Anything external, really, is guaranteed NOT to add meaning to life. Those things are just distractions. It's the inner stuff that really gives meaning to my day. And it's relationships, too, the ways that these inner worlds of people (and animals) come together and create the world together. And right now, I am feeling betrayed by that. All those years of loving, and one day it's all gone. It's as if it never happened - except in my heart, that is. How is that fair??? When I go down this track of thinking, then I feel like there's no point to life at all, we're just waiting around to die. And it's no fucking wonder that all the religions have made up things like "heaven." That's the greatest comfort ever, believing that at the end of the line, we'll be reunited all together in one big angelic party, with harps and clouds and that crap. I don't buy it for a minute.

The Buddhists really do lay it all out with no bullshit. Change happens constantly, and there is no external God to believe in. All we can do is accept that everything is going to fall apart, and love in spite of that, with as much compassion as possible. Life is going to pull the rug out from under us again and again. And eventually, it will be our very own body that has the rug pulled out from under it. As much as I try, I can't find anything in that that encourages me to embrace a spiritual path even more fully than before. If anything, I feel inclined to come back to my original question: "what's the point anyway?" I don't buy into any of that heaven and angels crap, and haven't since I was a child. The coddling of religion offers me no solace at all. But I have been spiritually motivated for years - right now, I can't even feel connected to that.

Well, at least I am walking in circles with the question...