I am starting off this blog with a post about The Presence Process - a book by Micheal Brown. The Presence Processes is a twelve week journey into our own pasts in order to awake to the present. Being a writer I find it extremely difficult to stay present and not get sucked into the drama of life. What else is there to write about if you’re not reliving the past or creating the future? The only problem with this I’ve found is that my imagination is so extensive I've managed to scare the crap out of myself.
A few months a go I was on the E train going from Penn Station to 51st and Lexington when I was instantly struck by an over powering fear that something terrible was going to happen. I wasn't exactly sure what it was but I don't think I've been that scared in my life.
I fight my mind constantly. It is my biggest enemy. And even now at twenty-nine years old I can’t talk my way out of being scared of the subways - getting trapped in it and not being able to get out. I also recently discovered that I'm deathly afraid of air planes and traveling out of the country; this coming from someone who has flown over one hundred times and traveled all over Asia at age twenty-two. So what is it that brings us to this boiling point? Is it our make-up? Our creative minds that won’t turn off? Or is there a reality to it all?
This is what I am trying to figure out and want to dedicate this blog site too. I am mapping my mind everyday, twice a day, sitting and meditating, becoming present and then searching in the past for where it all began - where in my childhood I became so scared of EVERYTHING. But somehow, this has to do with my writing, my creativity and my performance pieces.
This is not a blog solely about anxiety and mental health, this is a space for discussion on how the mind works - what it creates and how that somehow emanates into the world. I am hoping to attract readers, get comments, announce amazing things going on in my community and spread my community as far as it will go. I hope everyone will feel comfortable posting on my blog and will tell me about how they create, think, deal, whatever.
I am starting off with this post, in this manner because I am hoping to set the stage here – being as honest as I can. I hope all those whom add and comment on this blog are willing to bring everything to the surface, share their art, writing, experiments and psychedelic selves.
Sweet taste and love,
Emily
About Me
- Weather Experiment
- New York, NY, United States
- I am a writer and performance poet living in New York City. I am also one of the editors of Black Lodge Press - a publishing house working to circulate authors who cross back and forth between poetry, prose and that which extends forward. This blog is a weather tracking system of my search for the present. I hope you stop by often and add what ever you want to this open space.
8 comments:
Emily,
Great to see you online!
oh, this so gorgeous what you're about to delve into. and the weather as a metaphor for the anxious, forboding mind seems really helpful. boom, the thought creep into you - usually for me while I;m lying in bed before sleeping - and it;s just like a thunderstorm.. cracks of electyric nastiness that you don't understand but fear as if you knew what the emotions and thoughts are. like a storm, these mindstates pass, blow over, move on, of course to return, but knowing that this is the case(they always do pass) gives me confidence in these anxious moments - yea, I'm scared, but a short dose of time will wash the doom from my synapses.
And you asked, do these mindstates reflect any reality? That's a bold question to ask. premonitions (not sandra bullocks') the idea that we exist many more places than this body this moment, or at least have access to the reality of many more locations and many more times. or is it true what Borges presupposes in mnay of his narratives - that every possible event extends from each moment, creating an infinite amount of worlds and relationships. and if this is true, then we die every moment in some other existence, we murder someone every moment, we rescue a puppy in every moment, we resist the temptation to bite a friend's ankle in every moment and so on. And this seems very synonymous to the feelings that I get when I lie there and imagine as the train rolls by outside my window a man slamming my bedroom door open to unfold his murder upon my body - that yes, this does happen, I can feel the energy of this situation, it is there, present inexistence, but no it is not happening now and here.
kevin
Yeah Kevin, exactly. I’m working with this theory of Oneness or the fact that we are all emotionally connected and everything that happens to us is created or called by us. That’s seems to be close to what Borges says but more on the angle that every possible moment extends from each person. So we die every night because we are energetically connected to every person who dies every night and so on and so on. I love the idea of this as a narrative – the extension of our selves through out the entire human race showing up all over the world. How does that change our narrative? It reminds me of that piece you wrote about a man waking up in the middle of the night and running into himself in the living room, the extension of ourselves overlapping throughout the world. No wonder I’m so anxious.
Emily
You made a great leap and connection of thought here. One, i've never fused. So, our collective experiences and the way they unexplainably bubble up into our consciousness - this is a source of anxiety, an absurd feeling of Life trying to be understood through one body.
A lot more to be said about this...
Emily, I'd love to know more about how meditation is working for you. Even though I don't meditate half as much as I think about it, I sometimes feel like meditation is really the way to fit things back into their rightful spots in the body/mind.
sometimes I have the feeling that our lives are always being presented with (where does this generosity come from?) objects, feelings, situations, people that are saturated with any number of meanings and are meant to help show us something new and/or important toward what we're supposed to be doing. Life is always giving us the right information - even if it feels really bad. Which seems to be what you're saying. I've been having dreams, like chapters of a book, where I have to come face to face with demons. This shit is scaaaary. Themes continue in the dreams - the demons are totally threatening, but I don't have to fight them, I just have to stand up and face them and in the standing up to them, I am creating a kind of inner-mythology or even cosmology. I create myself. Still not sure what that means, but maybe it's something simple like it's okay and good to find the strength to be with the fears and anxieties and mind trips?
Ben
I just finished taking someone for an interview at McDonalds. That’s what my job is; I help people with developmental disabilities find jobs. Anyway, while sitting in McDonalds, helping this guy fill out his application, a woman next to me started asking me questions and saying things like “are they hiring here” and “that’s nice of you to help your boyfriend fill out an application.” I explained to her that the young man across from me was not my boyfriend but was my client and I was helping him get a job. She then began to vomit multiple comments about how she new people who needed jobs and maybe I could help them and her find a job; and on and on and on. No matter how many body signals or social cues I gave this woman, she would not stop asking me very uncomfortable questions. One being “if I got a note form my doctor saying I had manic-depression, could you help me find a job”.
Finally the restaurant manager came over and with out even interview my client, offered him a job and told him he started on Monday. We quickly picked up our stuff and got the hell out of there.
I’m telling this story for a reason and in response to Ben’s comment off my last post. After leaving the restaurant, I realized that this woman was a “messenger” of some sort. A person set up in my life to cause me discomfort and dis-ease. I realized on the bus ride home that this woman made me uncomfortable because he got me to say “I help find jobs for people with developmental disabilities” while sitting right across the table from one of my clients. Because I couldn’t think fast enough – I gave up the identity of my client and could feel him squirming in the seat across from me realizing he was the disabled person I was speaking of. In reaction to my making this man uncomfortable, I began to dislike this woman.
The lesson for me to learn here is that when I am unsure of myself, when I don’t know how to handle a situation or when I give up the identity of someone I am suppose to be protecting I become extremely uncomfortable and angry and I want to blame everyone but myself.
Ben, I am actually getting to your question – how meditation helps me. Sense I have been meditating every morning and night; I have become more aware of myself and my surroundings. I have slowed my thinking down (though only a bit) and can start to realize when I have reacted to people around me instead of responded to them. I’ve also realized what makes me angry in the world and that anger is really directed at myself. My goal is to one day be present enough that I will not react to woman who start to talk to me in McDonalds – but instead respond and move on. It is like you said about facing demons in your dreams – you don’t need to fight them, just face them.
so awesome. so awesome that you are seeing how it works in everyday life. It seems like it takes a simple kind of strength to see these difficult things. Good work. You're working it for real!
you reminded me of these dharma talks I've been listening to lately by this guy Eugene Cash. He's coming from a Buddhist perspective/orientation, but oh man, he is wise and useful. Here is a webpage with some talks on it. Good stuff to throw on when you got a little time here and there:
http://www.sfinsight.org/talks.html
Ben
I think perhaps we focus on ourselves too much, and forget the enormous, pulsing world that goes on around us without pause, in the present, not to mention the endless past that looms around us in legacy, informing everything we do. We as individuals are hardly everything.
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