Coming to work at Hawthorne, I've often felt a descent, like I used to experience as a kid during the summers of Sacramento. I was just in Sacramento for my cousin Jack's wedding, and while my parents were gone to pick up my uncle and aunt, I sat by the front window like I'd done as a kid, feeling the edges of that lonlienss that accompanied me so often, and that desire for someone to come home and put dimension back into the world.
I've begun experimenting with this space, which so many years into therapy and meditation, still is felt as a lack, a pain-laced void. Not fertile, not rich, not healthy, not me.
On waking last week at home, there was Anxiety to meet me, and as I lay in bed meditating on the anxiety, it struck me to think about what my "self" felt like in that moment. It/I felt fragmented, pourous, "see through." But instead of jerking away from it, my mind sat with what was there, the experience of emptiness, uncertainty of definition, void. But without the fear and recoil, it presented itself as innocuous if not friendly. It didn't consume "me," there was no explosion. Nothing happened. Just void.
So here at work, at this residential house full of people whose days are full of void--smoking on the back porch, maybe a walk to the corner store for a soda, a few brief conversations with their patio-mates--it dawned on me today, walking to fetch my laundry, that perhaps the friendly void of last week is the same void that we all experience here. The depression that I've often felt here, within and without, and which I've battled away like a poisonous gas, maybe it's actually this void, tangible and real and benign as any beautiful plant or lush sunset.
