7.21.2008

i have committed myself to the tasks of too many things, too many contrived methods of creativity and community, too many modes of transforming the self by false self-help dictates, that masturbatory domain of moneyed guilt, too many expectations weighing me down. in my quest to do what i want, to become who i am, i have lost sight of the simple, the pleasurable. all is the uphill battle, the constant struggle. every minute of every day is a field of lists, a galaxy of things done and undone and more, always, to do. i have lost the effort of sitting still, what it means to do nothing. my nothing is a big distraction from the things i must actually do. my nothing is an electrified means of checking out. i sit at the computer, fight in stupid fights, arguments i deem intellectual, but which are ultimately hardly challenging enough to justify. i drown my boredom in alcohol in the evenings, label it the stress, which, for all i know may very well be true. i spend my days hitting the refresh button, thirsting for something new and the knowledge of what this despair is that i might escape it.

i am filled with so much longing. it has always been that and it may very well always be such. the only thing to satisfy the endless wanting is pure, unadulterated hope. it is not the satisfaction of having that fills the longing, but the limitlessness of auspicious possibility. i am left trying always to figure how to cultivate that. it is in the trying again and again the new thing. but i am left - always always always left - with the burden of commitment and the new having gone, the hope dissolving into responsibility and actuality. no longer is the promise of vegetables in the summer simply the sum of gorgeous photographs of food, of delightful meals fit for magazines - it becomes the rotting beets from the CSA because it is too painfully sweaty to cook and because beet salads with carrots drizzled with citrus glaze uses but one of the seven beets, leaving me to sip borscht, which i hate. the fantasy or the detached image (out of context, intangible) are, in the end, more satisfying than the struggle to realize my hopes.

where does the balance lie? i try daily to fill my minutes with the positive, the fruitful, the inspiring. they don't feel positive or fruitful or inspiring. i feel bogged down with the irrepressible urge to be better than i am, happier, more fulfilled and i have sought the external to sate this. the unfortunate truth is that what is out there does not succeed in filling the holes inside. i become only buried. entombed in the mountains of debt to myself - things to do, places to be, and the yearning, always, for connection, for space, for the actual and thus for wholeness, completion, self-actualization. i need connection with this planet and this life and to breathe...it has become painfully obvious that i am not succeeding at all.