Wednesday, December 4, 2019 / Day 1:

…But when everything we thought we knew has turned to “nada” in the language of John of the Cross, we actually become more loving and compassionate human beings, for we no longer rely on our own light but upon the Light of the world living within us.

-Richard Rohr

Would I be doing this writing if I was otherwise occupied? With Children? A spouse? A job with a lot of responsibility? Pets? Or is my life so simple, so truncated that what the hell else would I do if I didn’t get up in the morning to study and write? I’d been asking for a simpler life…

Yesterday things start out so simply. Then I call my boss to ask him where he needs me and he’s like, “I honestly don’t know.” So the day just kind of opens up and I don’t need much encouragement to high tail it over to my favorite street in town. Suddenly things get very complicated because from about 1pm to 9pm that’s where I’m at, back and forth between my two favorite adult arcades.

The darkness emerges like a vengeance against all that is living, highlighted by contempt and derision directed at the men with whom I roam these arcades. In fact, I feel intense hatred toward them (kettle black). I’m like one of those lost boys in “Clockwork Orange,” so bored and out of it all I can do is roam around breaking things and committing all manner of evils. 

I think I should be disgusted with myself but I’m not.

Just yesterday I tried to shock a fellow who was sitting next to me at a coffee shop with my little iconoclastic diatribe about not giving a flying fuck about whether or not “Christ died for my sins.” Today I wonder if that isn’t a condition of my stone-cold heart. If it wasn’t so desensitized by my addiction those words might land on me with more weight, maybe (maybe not).

Regardless of the real complexities and obligations of life, people act out anyway. Because I live a simpler life with a lot of free time doesn’t make me more or less prone to addiction. People manage to hide their addictions in all sorts of lifestyles – busy, not busy, important and mundane alike. As Ernestine the telephone operator liked to say with a snort, “From presidents and kings to the scum of the earth!”

What if I really had nothing to do and nothing to defend? That’d be some serious evidence (in this culture) that I am nothing or not much. If I literally had nothing – nothing to defend, no image to project, no living to make.

Is this the recipe for a life of peace and happiness? I don’t know any homeless people who are lovin’ it. But I do know some very loving homeless people.

There is a light in us that only darkness itself can illuminate. It is the growing calm that comes over us when we finally surrender to the ultimate truth of creation: that there is a God and we are not it… Then the clarity of it all is startling. Life is not about us; we are about the project of finding Life…

-Sister Joan Chittister

Ein Sof (the nothingness all life came from)… Tikkun Olam (the healing of the world by uncovering the light)… Primary concepts of Hebrew Kabbala wisdom. The light of the world. Discovering this Life within me (though it’s not me, it transcends me), like pulling open a wound and light comes blazing out of it. There is a God and it’s not me. There is a universe but I’m not at the center of it.

Yet there is a God and there is a universe and while I’m nothing and even less than nothing in the face of all that, I’m integral and essential to it.

This week’s Daily Meditation from Richard Rohr has the visage of Helen Keller in the header, an embodiment of this theme of darkness and light. From Darkness. From silence… Helen Keller! From nothing… an enormously fruitful life! The implications of this, equally enormous.

One might even argue that from the power of the mind and the spirit, Helen Keller was able to break through her senses. Which raises the question, how much of each? More mind? More spirit? Or something completely different? Her teacher Annie Sullivan, half blind herself? A perfect storm… a miracle! Both of the Red Sea parting and the everyday sort.

One day we’ll know. And I bet we’ll all chuckle at the simplicity and the obviousness of it.

What else from the dark – the Ein Sof and silence – besides HK? Light and sound. Truth. This colorized photograph that looks like a painting at first. Look at her hand – so long and slender, her fingers so delicate and dexterous. See how the second rose looks a little blurred the way certain areas could be a little blurry in these old B&W photographs?