Elliott, why a blog and why one now?
This blog is my stake in the ground, my declaration that I am checking out of the system. Job, house, country, car, family, girlfriend I renounce thee!! And therefore I renounce all the things that come with you which is what all the above is really about: respectability, status, safety, comforts, money, goals, certainty...I will fail in this renounciation ultimately, but oh what fun it will be!
The peculiar thing is this seems all very calm and rational...like something one decides while choosing which brand of toothpaste to buy at the supermarket.
How did I get to point? I have spent the last 2 months (or 4 odd years really) staring into the abyss. Let me explain it this way - there's a book I like where the main character, for no particular reason other than that his life is completely dissolving around him, decides to go down a deserted empty well. He descends with no food or water and in this well he decides to sit until something happens. He sits, in the complete stillness and darkness waiting, and as his sense of time dissolves he dissolves until he reaches a single point of clarity. I am sitting in that well now. (Yes I come out of that well to have dinner with you nice folks occasionally but mostly I sit in that well and wait.) And a clarity is almost here.
Except that clarity is not clarity at all! It is neither an answer or a direction. Actually it is the total unravelling of any direction. And in the confusion lies the answer! I am a Zen monk solving a koan. It is just a intuition, an instinct of seeing a life based around fear, and of fear being a undercurrent of most of our lives. Of the profound mental/emotional/societal BS that I am not going to participate in anymore.
Above all else I feel sincerity, which one of my favorite things. And what is sincerity? It is another term for truth. And actual truth is what I am after.
So what does this mean in real tangible terms? Not much. Yet.
