A new plan, again: Day 12

Yes, yes, there was some depression this morning. Some self-loathing. I was half an hour late waking up and I sat in bed with the usual thoughts swimming by, about how I'm a shitty person and my life is empty and I'm desperate to receive some magical validation from everyone that in truth will never come and that this blog is worthless and I should slink back to my hole and go drink myself into unconsciousness because everything else is misery and pain.

But there's no reason why that has to matter! What a voice, eh? What a sad creature hunched in the darkness in my brain there. He can come out, if he needs to, dripping his slime everywhere, glum about everything, and I'll pat him on the head, tell him I love him, let him slouch about until he calms.

I'm enjoying this daily blogging. It's fab. It's a bit like that Zen technique of painting with water on rock. Wet the brush, draw out some quick picture, then as the sun beats down the water dries and the art disappears, and you go on your merry way.

Except I suppose instead of this disappearing it sticks around forever and ever, and I get to stumble across it in five years and wince at how clumsy and unguarded it all was. OK, it's not much like painting with water on rock.

But it is like that other Zen thing, which I guess it what I was really thinking about, where you take the brush and you swish and you flourish, and that's it, it's done. And the next day you do it again, and each time it is about mindfulness of form, of creation for creation's sake, and you don't stress and hone and edit, you just live in that now-realm of energy and an attempt to ride that energy, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. You love the imperfection, love the letting go of attachments, love the part of you that can never wholly let go of attachments. And onwards you march.

And of course the negative thoughts are there, as always, but you don't keep grasping at them, feeding them -- you let them out and you watch, in the blinding sunlight of awareness, as they evaporate, majestically, like water on scorching rock.

Does that tie the piece together? Not quite, but I guess with some self-knowing line about how I know it doesn't quite tie the piece together, it might just about work.

Yeah?