I don't get many chances to glue the pieces together in front of another person, and that's what it felt like I was given an opportunity to try to do. Not for her necessarily, mind you, or at least not to convince her of anything. More for me to get my explanations and understandings straight, and if some residue rubs off on her, great. I couldn't ask for a better sounding-board than Meghan. But it's always hard, since my views are pretty unorthodox.
With this weblog, it feels like there was a sudden left turn from suicide to monastic possibility, but for me, the underlying motivations towards either are very closely aligned. If anything, they're complementary. It's with horror that I realize that they look contradictory!
The important thing is that both of those "options" have been inside me for quite a long time, but whereas suicide has been constant and recurring, the idea of entering a monastery went underground for long stretches, which is why it had to kick me in the butt this time around to realize its possibility.
And as the possibility has taken serious root, I'm giving it a lot of attention and energy to figure out if it's something I can consider "real", or if it's a cop-out. It's funny, though, how I never need to explain the monastery thing very much to people. Either they accept it or it's . . . quirky. People don't take me very seriously, and that's fine, great, faboo. But suicide, there's more chance that people take it seriously and demand my explanation.
An important linchpin in my explanation is that it's something that's always been around, something that's been mulled and contemplated, and turned around and inside out in every direction and dimension I can think of. Before this recent monasteric binge, I had already been saying that my reason was just my being, the way I am, that what I consider a "good reason" to go is having no reason at all. Once I have a reason, it's not a good enough reason to go. Fabulously zen! So suicide rolled into spiritual quite smoothly.
But then the reminder that I have been dealing with this for such a long time like a disease, like a mental illness, and that instantly blew away the calm veneer that I've been trying to cultivate under the banner of non-form/non-attachment, and yes, suicide has always been in me like a primal calling, but also yes, it has been maintained and reinforced through the years by actual events and experience, of failures and frustrations and fragility.
It doesn't change a thing. Not yet, at least. It's just a mix in the pot, and what a mix! But even mixing in actual events and experience, which might clearly put the whole shebang into the mental health field, which is precisely what I had been doing here by considering this, above all, a mental health blog, non-form/non-attachment trumps all of that. The Dharma is pretty powerful shit. Just an eye-dropper full dilutes an ocean of mental health attachment.
We talked until almost five in the morning. How did that happen?
November 30, 2003; 12:54 P.M. - Alexandria, VA.
