‘The Suffering Entity’ – Carrying the Delicacy of One’s Remains…
Buddha-hood in Chronic Illness + A Destructive Artwork…
What residue remains after ‘the emptying’?
Traces of what was – and a meandering of what is meant to be found.
Through mind-fog and abdominal pain… everything becomes confusion… not knowing how to stick the landing – as every wakeful moment shifts within its own reflective awareness. This means: to have and have not – for the sparkling intuitive lesson loses grandeur light to the muddlement of attempts to live ‘what is being taught’…
By way of : Chronic illness is truly a cacophony of living. Every awareness around you becomes part of the great solitude. As long, arduous breathes aim toward a center-hood of relief – the body is awakened to its own capacity – entirely stimulated – encircling the turmoil already pinpointed to the now experience – inescapable.
Chronic illness, particularly chronic pain – washes away all concepts of what it means to live in this world. There is no other time than here – and in here – there has to be a loss. The pain is the loss – you are the pain. There is no other. You cannot be the person or ideas you once believed in – and a discernable future where you are active is not foundational – you have to embrace an ever-shifting reality. This leads to the sensical desire for an empty form. Being unfeeling, unknowing, unregistered – defines safety. For at the end of all knowing, becomes the unknowing – and transformation can take place within.
And this is where ‘The Emptiness' is. By navigation of nothingness – apathy – sustained relief from any feeling… stimulation arrives by becoming despondent to the world’s desires – as your only longing becomes “get me back to the status quo”.
In chronic illness – there is no ‘status quo’ of redundant normalcy. The body and mind have to manage life itself wherein : there is no end to suffering. It instills a lesson : every day, for the rest of your life, you have to embrace, manage and function as this Suffering Being – through veiled desecration of One’s physicality. Worship – hiding away a body of symptoms - maneuvering through the formalities of a culture benign to the underworld of constant disorder.
Within the social sphere – the ability to slow down by being within the interior emptiness – has been taught as frightful – garnished from the zeitgeist ideas of continuance, perseverance, ownership – a need to overpower your own intuitive senses in order to ‘go forth and conquer’. Signifying One’s emotions, bodily sensation, thoughts and metaphors are transgressors to our ‘situationship’ of functioning in the world – that each waking day we shall be ‘righteous and proper’ in our ‘functionality’ – i.e. : ‘putting on a face’ of ‘everything is alright’.
“How are you doing?”
“Good”… no more, no less… status quo.
What is this emptiness? Knowing what is true within. What is alive after the burning away of all ideas, all bodies, all thoughts – all desires for living. To not only be incomplete, yet honor that Sacral Center Emptying – awaiting next fulfillment.
Circling, circling, circling around and back to the emptiness… and the desire. Even though there is ‘The Emptiness’ waiting as its own form – it cannot be known until one slows down into the turmoil. And the profundity of it all! All of everything – (Everything, Everywhere, All at Once) – becomes you by this transgression.
A Buddhist proverb : “Suffering is what happens to you” …
As you are alive - suffering ‘is’.
We are the ‘All Suffering’
‘The Suffering’ comes, ‘The Suffering’ goes – with and without warning – it lives innate structures of living… yet, suffering is ‘something’ that happens to you – seemingly with no direct causation, no necessary relation – that ‘it’ just ‘is’. Yet, the suffering is not of you. It occurs around you. We can even go so far to say the suffering is for you – as it becomes you. Yet, you are the reactionary. It is by your own will (and recognition/cognition) to experience and respond to suffering in your own Way. And, as in the end – if you allow yourself - all you are, all you know, all you can feel – besiege and carry forward with – is the remembrance of suffering… “this is migratory – a creating… Suffering is a Sacral Creationary”.
As One knows suffering – One knows treatment. By being within ‘The Suffering’.
To be enacted within our own self in the ‘Way of Turmoil’ – is deemed a transgression to those around us. Disallowing the sick, the poor, the diseased, the distraught and the deformed – Our Underbellied Otherness – to be shown in true – Human Form. We love to hide circumstantial ugliness and despair underneath the ‘glory’ of perseverance.
One thousand steps of turmoil towards creation… one thousand steps of turmoil towards destruction…
Not many get the ability to face the end of who - or what - they believe to be ‘truth’. This is the emptiness Illness seeks to profound upon! You get to be – nothing - for a while. Lost in the heat of your own form – learning – over and over again – simply : How to Be - trusting what is delivered unto you from that spaciousness. Blissfulness in the unpredictability that you are under constant transformation – outside of your own control – yet, this illness is a status of universal love so deeply internalized and concerned with your Earthen-Well-Being.
It is by that which ‘destroys us’ – that is secretly conspiring to ‘create Us’.
Carrying the Delicacy of One’s Remains…
There are traces unknown that linger after the breaking point. Little tendrils of your old Way that cling to your core – reminiscent of what is for you in this vast world. Loosening the knots in tangled thought-work of what you thought you knew – what you believed life to be for. A raging newness from a raging body as you take new-birthing-steps – wobbling in a unique, hobbled, unbalanced way towards the next functional striding. Built within your own framework ability to flow into the world. From dissolved loss – the circling, draining, coiling emptiness - refilling the cup… recognizing how to place yourself where you are…
just simply where you are
Amidst the bodies crying out - distractions by fatigue and physical pains form - becoming layered and unlayered and re-layered – as a garden is overturned…
I am lost in this form – I have to bow to reverence : the turmoil that my body creates. Falling inwards entirely, eternally.
What is it I am learning here, trying to wrap my head around these combative body and mind awareness?
That there is no true form – other than what is right here in front of me.
Delicacy- or - 'What Can Be Traced After Emptiness'
Process: Watercolor Pencils and Charcoal… washed away with a common garden hose… retracing some intact lines…
As being an artist, there is a greater interest in what comes from the process of a piece...
Art being a formation of human investigation, a symbolism of inner reality, manifest to human nature...
yet in consistence with creation and destruction of that human ideology, human visage... striving for underlying formlessness - and the living residue.
sometimes i have too many words, but reading this and seeing your artwork/story of the work here i don’t have a lot of good words to describe my response. i am grateful for what you put here in my bones. thank you for sharing it.