A frog’s touch,

wasp whispers,

the unconditional embrace of Oak trees,

nakedness in full sun,

swaddling breath,

the view from the heart’s substratum--

that is enough.

Prelude to Simplicity

My life has been a mission to distill both tangible and epistemological substance, to collect the most meaningful fractions and to see them clearly, to find peace.  This passionate and scientific endeavor often has led me down complex or lofty paths—all temporarily helpful but eventually troublesome and therefore distracting.

  

I’ve tried to organize my thought patterns, resulting in several, sometimes overlapping, personal philosophic periods and the associated moodiness to accompany them:  a puritanical period, thanks to my 12-year old preliminary interpretation of portions of the King James version Holy Bible; a fleeting desire to convert to Catholicism (thanks to a lovely novel involving believable characters who were priests and nuns); there was a transcendental period, thanks Emerson and Thoreau; and a logical, scientific period when I chose a science major purely because all other answers seemed like bullshit;  finally, a recognition of cross-cultural and inter-personal archetypical patterns (thanks to multiple influences, including a few dear old friends) and validation of their presence (thanks to Eliade, Jung, Patanjali and others); and even a few purely obsessive periods fueled by my own insistence on developing my very own grand unified integration of everything known (relax, girl).  

I’ve also had a very common kind of dark period, when one tries to superimpose her Ideal onto another entirely resistant person or series of life situations; and been the “victim” of this sort of mistake more than once.  These dark periods transformed into the realization that I was--and most people were— spending energy making an inevitably disappointing mess of our surroundings by imagining what is not, then fighting or even trying to manipulate our world-as-it-is.  It became clear that darkness exists due to wasted attempts at gratification of desires, at validation of one’s own ego or worldview—including even the most easily forgivable and human desire to reconcile a longing for Oneness and Love. 

The value of establishing a personal philosophical framework or healthy relationships aside, there are many other ways in which the quest for peace is undermined by excess: collecting too many things – including too many self-improvement “tools”; undertaking complex dietary regimens, self-abuse through guilty or harsh internal dialogue; using too many words—ranging from simply verbalizing when it’s not necessary/kind/true/helpful to being desperately enthusiastic to be understood; collecting and flaunting “to-do list” items like medallions, fear of self-expression—apparently anything that creates mental or physical clutter.      

And, here, this publication begins with 1-the acceptance that anything that creates clutter hides peace and 2-the intention of reducing clutter in all its forms.  In the coming days, I’ll share a series of explorations in the pursuit of simplicity.