From my journal on Monday, 12th March:
I keep having challenging thoughts about my future, my recent past, and my current work/projects and deadlines. Then I remember, Oh yeah…they’re just thoughts. When I remember that a thought is not actual reality – maybe a pointer, even a damn good indicator, but not actually real - then the thought suddenly turns hollow; this has just started happening in the past few days. There is this hollowness, like an empty shell. A carapace. A shadow. An apparition. Sometimes they are layered thoughts; I have made up some idea and then I think about it as if it has been manifest in the world. So there is also a kind of peeling back of layers in looking at my thoughts. I remember that meditation is a good tool for calming the mind. And as I begin to meditate, watching the thoughts, they take on that insubstantial emptiness: shells. (Bullet shells? Peanut shells? Worm casings?) So I am giving myself over again to the practice of seeing thoughts as not-actual.
From my journal on Thursday, 15th March:
I’ve been
thinking about thoughts (haha). “Thoughts as shells” continues to be a useful
and comforting image with regard to made-up fears and exaggerated ideas about
situations. I am so drawn to philosophy and theory; yet I also understand that
while they might have a good and useful application in life, they are merely
viewpoints or lenses through which to see something. But still, I cling to and make
much of them. I want to re-member those other parts of me, all four acting in
concert: body, psyche, mind and spirit. For me it is about balance…keeping all
four alive, active, intact (not valuing thoughts, for example, over inspiration,
but holding both equally).
From my journal on Friday, 16th March:
Yet I look
outside and see the incredible beauty of the light on the trees and how the sky
is nearly lavender – a periwinkle blue of an unbelievable intensity with the
rich dark green of blowing Doug fir boughs, cones hanging thick on their high branches;
and the catkins on the alders, hanging in dark red-orange worms from the twigs.
And as soon as I write it down, the moment is gone. Nature is this blessing
that unfolds itself over and over, in seasons, repetitions of cycles, in beauty
and death and rebirth. As the bushes burst out in leaf buds, bright yellow
greens (the tall trees a bit more patient in their unfurling), I am reminded
that the fearful insubstantial thoughts that I allow to bloom into stories that
my brain has woven into far-fetched fiction tales is not the life I want. I
desire, instead, to let them come, the armies of thoughts, and to watch them
pass by, not giving them the attention they seem to feed upon, craving to take
me over, into their clutches. All I can do is remember, over and over and over,
how precious this one little life is and that if my thoughts spin out too much
– too often or too deeply – then I will miss the riches, the truly
extraordinary nonfiction world around me.
All blog photographs taken by Jennifer J. Wilhoit unless otherwise noted.
