I awake at 4am the morning of August 9th, 2023, burdened with a deep and familiar anxiety. As I slept, the “weirdness” of my life crept past the defenses of my consciousness, and waking in the midst of it I automatically relate to it with contention.

My memory ranges across the last four years of my life. They’ve been extraordinarily tumultuous. In many ways, I’m a completely different person than I was in 2019. In many ways, I’m completely the same. The weirdness of that paradox hovers over my brain; the weirdness of the unpredictable series of events, mundane and spectacular, which interwove into this exact paradox I call “myself” permeates the pillow, the sheets, my breath against the sheets.

Weirdness leaves no ground to stand upon. A lack of ground generates my anxiety. My anxiety has an intimate connection with my pain, draws it out: pain I carry, and pain I fear to carry.

Pain hurts. My habitual posture toward it is contentious; I deny it, fight it, ignore it, or try to solve my way out of it. These strategies work occasionally, but never permanently. All leave the pain right where it’s always been. Waiting. Wanting.

Denying it, fighting it, ignoring it, or concocting an ideal set of actions to work myself out of it, all are different configurations of the same basic posture: contention. Refusal to acknowledge the pain of my existence. Pain-begetting-pain-begetting-pain-begetting…

So that morning, I decide to let it be. People talk about letting the pain in, and I think I do that, but my felt experience is of the pain letting me in. I am stepping into a skin that trembles.

I curl into a ball. I shudder. I remember to breathe.

Faces, conversations, abandoned dreams, disappointments, pleasures, sublime moments — all weave together into a suffocating psychic fabric pulling taut around my head. I want to run. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to sleep.

Instead I hold myself closer, relax into the fabric of my existence.

I am suspended. Groundless. Weird.

New shapes in the psychic fabric: I see that the times I’ve regressed back into my cocoon of limiting habits were always when I acted from contention. When I’ve grown, it’s been from rooting myself in the fecund earth of the pain I carry, standing upright, holding a raw heart to the open air.

Then I realize that pain is necessary. It’s simply a part of life. It is the characteristic of a raw heart, exposed to the world. By entering pain, I am exiting armor and constraint. I am finding freedom, and bravery.

Warmth begins to ebb.

Vision broadens, compassion deepens — I am present with the pain, and that connection perpetuates more presence until there is a profound sense of wholeness and sacredness to everything. Boundaries dissolve.

Everything is beauty flashing into existence.

—

I watched a cicada emerge from its cocoon this summer. It took its time circling a squat stone pillar again and again until it finally came to rest, anchored against the side. It pushed itself out slowly, gently. At one point, its new body was parallel to the ground, half in, half out of the cocoon. I held out my hands, afraid it would fall. It didn’t. I retracted my hands, and watched the wisdom of the world play out before my eyes.

It righted itself, revealed wispy translucent wings that fluttered in the breeze. Then it crawled out of its cocoon.

Metamorphosis. Release. Yet still, it couldn’t fly. Its wings hadn’t hardened. So it stayed next to the cocoon, waiting.

I found a lesson in this. We circle incessantly — often, we’re not sure what for, exactly, but still we circle. We do it until we find a place to anchor and rest, either by choice or by force. Latent here is the possibility of transcendence. Slowly, steadily, we can grow out of our egoic shell, the function of which is, fundamentally, protective; the structure of which is, necessarily, bureaucratic. A central self, constituted of arbitrary mental processes formed around intentional ends, always in service of enhancing and protecting its envisioned locus of control. Gain territory, defend. Gain territory, defend. Lose territory, bemoan. Gain territory again, and thus the cycle perpetuates.

When looked at honestly, it is the same as all bureaucracy: an arbitrary construction. All process, no substance. A constant breathless effort to keep inflating an imaginary balloon. A confusion of speed for efficiency, output for efficacy, and aggression for power.

Release takes time. To aggress is to regress. It takes gentle, consistent effort. Then it takes the effort to release effort. Then it takes simply being present, to let be.

Awareness dawns. The egoic bureaucracy knows so little, assumes so much, fears even more. One becomes more and more interested in the world outside of it.

Finally, one becomes a mirror.

—

Warmth ebbs.

Curled into a ball, I hug myself closer. I realize ego is not to be reviled. The cicada didn’t hate its cocoon. It rested beside it. Perhaps it was honoring it. After all, it is a paradox: the cocoon both was and wasn’t itself.

Release is simultaneously complex and simple. Complexity lies in the infinite mutability and adaptability of the egoic structure; simplicity, in the dignity of being. Letting be collapses the complexity of the ego down into a single point, the present, and that focused energy drives the growth of the spirit which hatches forth from the ego, like the cicada from the cocoon.

Complexity begins with the unexamined belief in duality.

Even one simple duality hinders the natural release process, and can be the root of infinite complexity. If there can be one, there can be two. Two, then, three. Thus we end up at ten thousand things. Yet paradoxically, assuming one simple duality, becoming lost amidst infinite complexity, also is the natural release process.

There is beauty to this, but its nature must be understood.

The duality with which I’ve always persisted is Me vs Pain. Recognizing the connected nature of their separateness, I am able to enter into the pain, and metamorphose into a being who stands upright, brokenhearted, and profoundly in love with the world.

Today, I marveled at a yellow dragonfruit in Kroger.