Essay--777

By R. Newell

From the manuscript, Wingnut in a Wingsuit

It’s the seventh day of the seventh month and with my feet comfortably propped I am listening to the seventh track of U2’s Unforgettable Fire album blaring on the morning breeze that’s wafting through the early heat. I watch desert hares drink from the dripping hose and sip my Mavericks clove coffee chock full of “mellow sweetness”—as advertised--laced with a heavy dose of spice.

Having showered the weary bones which are turning to dust within me and having balled another wad of hair into the bottom of someone else’s waste paper basket, I witness the world outside the window with my morning coffee clutched between my palms. My heart beats erratically, in gasps. I am barely able to hear the wind blowing through the sage and cedar.  Normally spasmodically hyper, I’m as listless as a leaf some days.

One daughter says I need more fruit; the other suggests I find Jesus. A well intentioned friend suggests hallucinogenics.  Another tells me to go get laid, to find happiness with another, as if that’s where it lies rather than in divine grace. As if any of those things will recover time.

I am an aged woman recognizing her waning weathered life, acknowledging her successes and failures, and beginning the challenging process of disassociating from physicality. I am fortunate to hold many of the same basic philosophies now as I did at the threshold of life. My life’s trials and tribulations have not been due to a lack of identity or absence of voice as it has been with some in my acquaintances. As then, I am still foremost a philosopher and philosophically, I remain a Cynic, committed to living a virtuous ultra simplistic life in harmony with nature. 

Socially, according to Max Weber, I am still aligned with “inner world” secular asceticism in that I live more and more removed from society in order to practice conscious choice and non attachment to dependency, in order to attain a sense of unbridled metaphysical freedom, to delve luxuriously in moksha.

Practitioners claim that these measures yield a higher perspective, a less adulterated understanding of life. Yet, I have abandoned my need to know. I have forfeited my desire to understand. I had to; my sanity, let alone my serenity, depended on my doing so. I could not continue to cling to my sense of need and want any more than I could go on being possessive about my thoughts or opinions. Not when so many instances throughout my life only served to validate that it mattered little what I wanted or needed, what I said or didn’t say. A lifetime believer in the existence and power of Jung’s Collective Conscience, I have always known that nothing I could ever come up with would be novel. There are no firsts; it’s all been said and done before. In this aspect we are, therefore, never isolated in our temporal experience.

Much to my eternal dismay, I’ve grown into a crone whose passions have been tempered, who has lived long enough to finally comprehend the value in detachment. And truthfully, there is undeniably an immense feeling of relief therein. Nirvana, the state in which delusion is extinguished is fact becoming my middle aged mana.

I don’t consciously seek enlightenment; I honestly don’t. I don’t need to get it—the big picture, the ultimate purpose of it all—never did and at 49 still don’t. Yet, I do consciously seek more than the acquisition of stillness, more than spiritual peace or vibratory attunement. I inequitably and unabashedly yearn for bliss. I just don’t try to experience it through others anymore as there seems to be little constancy in that venture and I’m all about sustainability.

The Grecian root for the word ‘grace’ is chairo, meaning to delight in. Interestingly, “aloha”, the Hawaiian greeting for both hello and goodbye actually means “to love is to be happy with.” Since a child, I’ve been drawn to the island state of mind, but, seriously, how absolutely beautiful to live in conscious grace, to exist in unconditional love. What could possibly be more vital or significant than to selflessly love? Could there be any other meaning to our lives than to bring as many as we can to the purity of love through lovingness? I’m thinking, no.

As the U2 song goes, “If I could, I would/Let it go/Surrender/Dislocate…If I could throw this/Lifeless lifeline to the wind/Leave this heart of clay… If I could through myself/Set your spirit free/I'd lead your heart away/See you break, break away/Into the light…”