Bhakta Priya's Blog
A kind of clarity long missed
The usual cliches people speak of, for example being true to yourself and living your own life, never made sense to me before. I didn't know what they were talking about. But now I do, atleast somewhat more. What does it mean to be true to yourself? In this world it is so difficult to actually know who you are and what you want. We may be living a life we assumed we chose to live, but find out later on that we were the product of all kinds of self conditioning and have lived falsely. We will break our own hearts to discover what a trick we have played and how much time we may have wasted. It will hurt more than anything to realize we have been false, to ourselves and thus to others. To be conscious, deeply and clearly conscious of ourselves is an ability that takes a great deal of dedication and constant introspection. It is our most constant task, but if we can become self aware our lives will be all the more rich for it. I have come to understand, with not a little bit of grief, that the life I am living is maybe not the one I chose for myself. These are solemn days that greet me. To have the courage to live your own life, even at the cost of what everyone you hold dear may think, is harder than I ever imagined. It is easier to put down the feelings that surface and make one suspect they are not where they are supposed to be. If I just wait it out, if I just try to see it a different way, it will become better. That is what we can tell ourselves. Even if what I choose to do is not in line with everything I learned in all the years previous to this, even if it clashes with what I know to be true, maybe I have to do it. Maybe I am not ready for a different kind of life. It is my karma to go through something else first. I was put into a place that I was not yet ready to handle, but I have a taste of it that will stick with me when I must go a different way.It will one day call me back. This I know. When the world is handed to you on a plate, it is difficult to appreciate it. Atleast, it is my failing that I cannot. All my life I have had the most extraordinary things happen to me. I have lived a life that many people dream about, adventure, travel, unusual and wonderful circumstance. I have been rich in friends and love. I am surrounded by strong positive and dynamic people, I am engaged to marry one of them. I bear a charmed life. But it tears me to bits that I cannot appreciate it as I should. I am not content in paradise. Is this just a sign of my terrible self centeredness? Or does it mean I am not ready to be here, I do not deserve to be here until I can alter my perception? It is so damnably hard to know which it is. But small illuminations grace me. And with these few perceptions I can know that something must change. I must change before I can become a person deserving of the grace that has been given me. And I realize I am not allowing myself to be nourished by this life because I feel I do not deserve it. Sometimes I even resent it. I do not feel right living like this until I have learned by hard work and pain what it means to have such a beautiful life. I want to return truly knowing why I am here, why I am choosing this, and full of wonder to have found the truth.
Writing is no longer easy for me. That has been hard to live with. Writing was always something I was good at, it was my place, I could create whatever I liked with words, I could put myself on paper far more accurately than I could ever do so in person. Everything has changed this last year. Everything I thought about myself, everything I held to be infallibly true. Oh the beautiful torture of a world turned upside down! But what would we be with a static existence? If we always felt the same, and never grew as people? No one said change and growth was painless. It is the pain that makes it more obvious something is altering. I'm a little dense sometimes, I need sharp indications.
There are days when I can't bear the evil in this world. Or the destructive forces that reside within my own body. It is said, never underestimate the power of denial, but how can you blame someone for not seeing something because it was too close to themselves to recognize? All that is terrible and ugly in this world threatens to drown me and I lose all desire to be part of this grand play.It just seems so terribly terribly hopeless. The world is going to hell, slowly, piece by visible piece and I can only watch in stunned fascination. We must search so hard to find good people and good things. Why should it be this way? Has it always been this way? Is it only a symptom of the age we live in? Many old cultures, from India to the Aztecs spoke of different world ages dominated by different types of people and events. We are in the last one before what is supposed to be a great destruction. I don't doubt it. Probably not in my lifetime, but the seeds of decay are well in place. I do not wish to live the rest of my life in America partially for this reason. Economically, its a house of cards that I do not want to be involved in as it tumbles down with no insurance. Maybe I am unreasonably pessimistic but I think this world is not becoming a better place, in fact it is in a state of degeneration on all levels. And I do not see how it could ever be reversed unless most of the worlds population made major lifestyle and moral changes. But thats not going to happen. Its important to feel as if what you do could matter in some small way or else we all become nihilistic and lose any reason to live. But at the same time, is it right to fool ourselves that we do matter? I suppose I'm still uncertain on this point, but ultimately I feel we should act as if the universe were listening, we should seek beauty and truth, make music, live as selflessly as we can, we should act as if life were going to win. I want to believe that is how it should be. I believe strongly in the way of life I have been raised in, the idea of the god I worship and the constant struggle of birth, death, and rebirth in the cycle of karma, in which I am attempting to get out of. But certainly there are times when I wonder if I am no different from any other person who believes in a god. We could all be wrong. We could all be right. There is no way of actually proving it, so we must only go on a feeling. And that is what I do. Faith runs through everything that we do. I must have faith that I will wake up again tomorrow morning, or else I might be too paranoid to go to sleep.(for a silly example) We have faith in things we don't understand at all. They just happen on a daily basis and we don't really question it. That could be seen as the most powerful substance in this world that transcends any material obligation, or it could be seen as the most brittle. I think though, it is by faith that some of the most important achievements have been made in history. Sure, its not scientific, but the eternal soul knows things that the material mind does not.
I came across a video(www.meat.org) the other week online at a news site about the meat industry. Firstly I was surprised to see something that graphic regarding the abuse of animals on such a mainstream site. But that is good. Attention needs to be brought to this issue. People have no idea what is actually behind the things they eat. The short film is horrible in its reality, I could hardly bear to watch it, it made me cry to see fellow humans beating pigs on cement floors until they die because they were not growing fast enough, or throwing chickens into cages as if they were lumps of coal, with as much concern, or a cow with her throat slit pouring blood, still opening and closing her mouth, the man who had done this just idly standing around holding a bucket under her neck to catch the blood. And we wonder why mankind does the things it does to eachother. It is no mystery. Look at how we treat living things that are smaller or weaker than ourselves. Entities that clearly have feelings and consciousness. There is no humanity in a person who condones this kind of behavior. It is sickening. What does it tell you about yourself if you could not be moved by such mindless cruelty?
The other day there was a man passed out drunk in the bushes next to a grocery store I was walking into. I have never seen someone passed out in public before, I thought he may have been dead he was so still. But I got closer, and saw that he was indeed breathing and I was satisfied that I didn't need to call some authorities. You never know in Italy, maybe it was some mafia dealing. Thats not a problem up north so much, but in the South, everything is run by the mafia. Or so I'm told. It is normal to be visited by the men in black and pay your monthly dues, no matter your type of business. I had two reactions to this inebriated sot. Firstly I felt disgusted at how humans can waste their lives;how they can let themselves drop so low as to be passed out midday sunday in the bushes of a grocery store. Secondly, I had to laugh at the irony of it all because in typical Italian fashion the man was dressed to the nines and his shoes were expensive and impeccable.
Much to my chagrin cowboy boots are in la moda with a vengeance this spring/ summer. I think cowboy boots are one of the worst styles ever, and it looks even more retarded when your dressed in beautiful perfectly tailored clothes. People are so trendy here its boggling. How can you have the money to buy/ wear everything that comes in that season?
and now I have been outside in the evening:
I am so happy to be alive watching the color of spring change to the summer tones. To sit surrounded by grass so high no one can see me sitting there, unless they were to fly over. The golden wheaty heads of grass catch the evening sunlight, reflecting a brilliant white gold. The musky smell of earth, pollen and green things makes me light headed. There is stillness here. In the half shadows of the evening. Everything is soft and curved and drenched in twilight.
I lay on my back and watched the clouds slowly swirling, turning in some hapless pattern shaped by winds I cannot feel many miles above where I lie. For here, close the earth the air is still. It is only interrupted by the hum of insects, and the occasional snatches of indiscernable italian conversation echoing down the hill to me.
But shadows begin to form in the low places. The air is still full of the smell of sun warmed earthy things. I am blessed to breathe. To watch a tiny bug crawl up the stem of a flower. I wish I knew what that felt like.I must be careful where I lie lest I take more lives than I intended. I am surrounded by incandescent beauty, and yet with every breath I take, I am destroying countless small organisms. My sinuses are full of them. Yeck. What a way to ruin the romance of the moment. That and the bugs crawling up my pant legs. I wish I could live and not harm any other living thing. But I must. I do not kill animals but I am also a vegetable murderer..haha..it just doesn't sound so intense somehow.
God what a dark world it can be. You think you know someone, and that you can trust them. But you are being utterly deceived. It is a story I cannot relate here, but suffice to say last week was not an easy one. It was a roller coaster ride and I didn't realize how much it had affected me until last saturday I was riding my bicycle back from work with Dave and I started completely wigging out. Something inside me just cracked and everything that I had been holding in and back came tumbling out. I made no sense. I babbled about beavers and sang poems, I felt like I was made of air and had no balance.I curled up on the side of the road and sobbed and could feel nothing but the terrible dark vacuum of madness that I was hovering upon. It was burning cold but did not bring any clarity, only the empty and thoughtless desire to follow it wherever it went because in a way I had never felt so free. Even the colors of they day looked different, altered, tweaked, unnatural. I only hoped that I truly had not gone mad and that I was only having a nervous breakdown(or something like that)Something changed in those moments for I had touched an abyss. Nothing is the same when you have felt yourself truly fall apart, like a boat splintered into a thousand pieces from the storm and then quietly floating on the surface of the water. Rocking, lulled into a incongruous tranquility. That was me, I was trying to sink into whatever I was near, I leaned against a stone wall and could imagine my body forming itself to slowly fall back into its grainy surface until I had disappeared. It took days for me to feel normal again. I was fragile and wide eyed like any newborn creature, hiding in my room, trying to hold quietness within me, trying to find a place of stillness again that I did not tumble into.
How many times will my heart be broken today? all the trust I put into empty people begins to crumble catastrophically..magnificient destruction of my heart..new parts of it are found to hurt in all of the last hours..i curl up and weep, crying as honestly as any child whos hearts been broken for the first time. I am reduced to bone and tendon, wincing at the touch of sheets or kindly hands.i want only to sink into the earth, to be compacted and decompose..what makes love be so cruel and unbending? Can it be love at all then?I must cast away what keeps bringing me down. The negative influences, the people that don't respect me or aknowledge that I have real and valid feelings. I am not something that bends and then pretends to return to its usual shape..
this day is full of holes
echoing shapeless spaces
that we are all trying
not to fall into
it makes shadows
under our eyes
lines of our lips
silence haunts
the corners of the room
we try to hunt away
the shadows
we take out our brooms
to sweep it out the doors
To make some sense of it
in the light
But even the sun
can not shed the disorder
that hangs sticky and stale
nor the rose scent drifting
unconsciously inside
it is sickly sweet to our noses
a tactless intruder on our grief
Internal demons are all relative things. People can look at my life and say " you have nothing to suffer from, you have not experienced pain or evil. You have made very few mistakes, or done stupid things. What could you possibly have experienced that would cause you such grief?". That is a good question, and I have struggled so long trying to understand why darkness haunts my soul, and the days where I lie bruised in a delirium struggling to find a reason to even move. I had no reason right? My life was perfect, and therefore I was meant to be perfect by measure. It was that very condition that slowly ate away at me with its ascerbic assumptions. Every since I was a child I was told I was amazing, intelligent, impossibly talented at whatever I did, energetic and going great places. How could I possibly live up to that ideal that was created for me before I could even know myself? It was bound to end badly when I finally entered the real world, where I was no longer so special or so protected. I had to come off my cloud and discover that I was flawed, and most wonderfully human. It has been a long process trying to rewrite my own complicated definition of perfection. To learn compassion for myself, to not panic when I realize I am not the incredible person that I tried to create, as a child that wanted only to please everyone, and instead, that I am only a girl finding her way through this world. And that is enough. Just to exist is enough, in a way. Old habits die hard, I assumed that no one would like me if I wasn't some creature of perfection, if I wasn't everything I had always been. I assumed I couldn't like me. I became everything I never wanted to become, and hating myself every minute of the way, and now I"m slowly finding my way back again. Once you have fallen into such a place it is hard to forgive yourself. To trust yourself. Faith seems such a brittle thing now that you know you can betray yourself without a second thought. It is like recovering from an addiction, you can always relapse. Once you know a place, then you know how to get there again.
I have not shot myself up with heroin, I haven't stolen or harmed people I loved, senselessly. But just because my crimes are not as dark on paper can anyone say I feel them any less? In my own relative experience they are just as harmful, just as difficult to deal with. I may be wrong, but for now, that is what I say and what I believe, and it gives me the ability to justify that I feel something, and not feel guilty for it. Guilt is not a constructive emotion. It doesn't allow me to let go of anything, instead it keeps me from growing through it.
Anyone who thinks my life in Italy is all great food and beautiful vistas is greatly delusioned. I just choose not to detail the hardships. Anyone who has lived monastically,(which discludes exactly everyone I know but my brothers) as I could safely call it, could understand where I'm coming from. Do not judge what is beyond your understanding from lack of experience. I have given up my personal freedom, if one could call it freedom even, to live in an ashram(and mostly working) for at least the next year. I have dedicated myself to helping this place to get off the ground, in every capacity that I can. I can't go out dancing, I don't have friends to hang out with, I pretty much don't to anything I would really like to do.. Heck I maybe get one day off a week and I usually end up cleaning the bathroom and doing laundry. On the surface the work is not hard, although anyone who's had to crash course learn a language and have your language skill entirely coincide with the success rate of sales can attest to the kind of stress that leads to. I may not be doing schoolwork, or presentations, but I am at a very large crossroads right now in my life and everything that I do in the next months is incredibly important. I have got a lot of crap to work on, and if I can live out this situation, I can do anything. Living communally tries every ounce of patience and tolerance I have. I want to run away screaming oftentimes. But yet, I am still here. I am finding I have a great deal more forbearance than I ever imagined, and it is this experience and whether or not I can tolerate and learn to grow from it, that will really be a turning point in my life. I feel this quite deeply. It may not look like it from the outside but I am fighting for my life right now on more levels than one.
That is not to say that aspects of life here aren't extraordinary. I have never lived in a place so captivatingly beautiful. I have never been able to get up at 5 am, drive 15 minutes, hike for 30min and watch the sunrise on the snow covered alps. Dear gods, I never knew what beauty was until I lay in an alpine meadow surrounded by crocuses by the thousand, closer to the clouds than I had ever been, in air so clean it made me light headed. I was , for moments at a time, completely suffused with an otherworldly bliss. I was part of earth and sky and everything in between. I have never loved a place so much before,I have never felt so acutely the wonder of gods creation. What a being, to envision something like this, pools of mist on craggy peaks. Valleys so clearly formed by glaciers I can see them creeping in my mind, through an eternity. Deep dark lakes that on clear days reflect the miles high mountains that cradle its shores.
Ah. And little bit by bit I feel myself returning to where I have been so many months ago, a place I have wanted desperately. I had forgotten how to see small things, to even know that I loved to describe them. I didn't know how I felt about anything or anyone. It was this wretched lukewarm soup of existence and I was stuck in it. I feel a stranger returning to her home after many years. But its not been too long that I may no more be comfortable here, instead the pass of time has lent a certain richness to this place. I find it comfortably weathered.More what I want to be after all.You know what? Im gonna be okay. I am starting to truly believe that and thats a place I can actually start from.
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