Perfection

I know a Sanskrit prayer that I learned at school, it translates to

That is perfect
This is perfect
Perfect comes from perfect
Take perfect from perfect and the remainder is perfect
May peace and peace and peace be everywhere

Unlike numbers that are liable to be divided, Hinduism says perfection is not lessened and doesn't somehow decrease when it is divided. I started to think of humans as a prime example, endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours and capable of producing another human endowed with a full gamut of emotions, thoughts and behaviours.

I can't think of any thing or entity other than life itself that is not diminished by extraction or duplication. Even the proliferation of cancer cells is the blossoming of perfection in their infinite capacity to reproduce perfectly functioning disease cells.

Energy isn't lost or created. It just rotates around the universe weaving in and out of living things like a big tapestry.

Walnuts

I have no bad things to say about love, I have only disheartened things to say about the human mind which is liable to screw things up because it's wiring was set when we were small people and it can be troublesome to convert an old machine to run with new software.

You might have had the gift of having your heart broken, and then having it broken, and broken and rebroken. Or maybe it just happened once I don't know. It might have made you a little less lovable and unloving. But nonetheless notice how your heart has persisted with love, how it wants to be in relationships and how it still yearns to care and be cared for. The mind of a child screams "WHAT ARE YOU DOING? THIS WILL HUUUUUUuuurrrrrttt....." in the tapering fading way that children's admonitions sometimes go, and you think maybe that you are really stupid for allowing yourself to love again, and you crawl towards love with your tail between your legs and hissing a little bit, unsure whether to bite or run or just sort of hang around. Experiences as a child with bee stings and broken glass have taught you to be discriminating, because not everything beautiful brings pleasure. Yet we don't consider that the most beautiful thing is already inside us and is the thing that perpetually drives us to give of ourselves.

Let your heart break and break again because the breaking reveals the unbroken love inside.

Black squares and awkward silences

A few months ago I was at a photocopier in a library and made a useless copy of a page. I threw it into the waste paper box, where I saw a white sheet of paper covered in a black square. Someone had left the lid of the photocopier open and let it scan the space of the room above, which rendered a black square. It looked like an overexposed polaroid or the black Malevich. 

I kept the sheet of paper, because it reminds me of the phenomenon where what looks like nothing actually contains the information of everything. When you look into the blackness of the sky at night you're looking into infinity, even though it appears blank.

Similarly silences in conversations reveal as much as words. What isn't said explains the way you understand the people you talk to, the way you distrust and what you trust in. Sometimes absences have a presence that we're not used to looking for. 

Dropping stuff

Nothing ever tells you to want less, everything tells you to want more. So you go around collecting lots of stuff, lots of nice things. You turn your home into a wunderkammer jammed with things you like, a mausoleum for the things you don't like (because you hold onto those too) and then you open it up like a museum when you take part in small talk. Shelves of opinions and prejudices sit and collect dust, you might take one down and rotate it, talk about it for a while, then place it back in its spot where it's been for a long time.

We keep our opinions and prejudices, expectations and preconceptions just like we keep our toys from childhood, we keep our milk teeth, we pick up books we won't read, we stack up diaries already written, letters already read. Jewellery that doesn't suit us, clothing that's stained or too small, food that's gone off.

I've come to a situation where I need to lose the things I've gathered in order to move forward, and it's difficult because I've never needed to before. I collected lots of ideas about myself and ideas about how to meditate. I would line up rogue thoughts and tie them in bundles and throw them off cliffs, just to try and clear my head. That took up a lot of energy and they kept coming, like lemmings. Meditation became difficult and I slowly lost hope for it being what I had expected: silent, calm, expansive.

Then I spoke to a really lovely man who told me that I don't need to wrangle my thoughts like wild horses, that in fact I have to let them go. It's not like unpicking a hem, it's like taking your clothes off. It's not like exfoliating your feet, it's like being a snake and shedding your old skin.
You don't need to commit to laborious work to undo habits, just open your hands and let them fall and focus on something else.