I have checked my email countless times in avoidance of this elemental task of mine. For whatever reason, I have been given the ontological imperative to string words together, to transform a congeries of impressions into meaning, to lend some continuity to the chaos of life.

I did not publish a single piece of writing in the year that I fell in and out of love. My terror of the vast night, of listless afternoons, of not belonging to this world, of being out of sync with the tempo of modernity repeatedly hinders the imaginative urges that dwell within the deepest part of me. In order to actually write, I have to accept that I am fundamentally alone. Writing as a devotional practice = demonstrating to myself that I am capable of resting in solitude, placing faith not in notifications or potential paramours but in my own wholeness. In the face of the razor’s edge of feeling, knowing that I can respond sanely and calmly, This is how it is.

I am of a zealous nature. The whole of my unfolding has been driven by the yearning to give my heart away, totally and unreservedly. In a culture of instant gratification laden with the bait of craving – What is real? What has staying power? What is worthy of my ardent, overflowing devotion? What can I praise?

Possessed by the urgent, ceaseless yearning to be reborn, I set sail to be still. I spent the entire month of February at a silent meditation retreat. No technology, reading, writing, talking, sex, meat and shopping. Much of my milieu interpreted my interest in renunciation as running away from life, but as T.S. Eliot writes in “The Family Reunion,” In a world of fugitives/ the person taking the opposite direction/ will appear to run away. I encountered every emotion that I face in quotidian existence, but without diversions to whisk me away from being wholly present to myself. The experience was one of depth psychology as I moved through the existential agony of Is this all there is? to definitive awe before that which resists comprehension.

With a schedule full of nothing (i.e. meditating from 5:30am to 9:15pm), I was often overcome with torpor, restlessness, and dreadful anticipation of a day without diversions. During the first two weeks, I wore a relentlessly ticking analog watch and counted the days until I could inhale a burrito while rewatching The Matrix in bed. But slowly I began to live out my higher aspirations; I put my watch away, and accepted the invitation to live outside of time.

An approach to coming in contact with eternity: What awed my ancestors? How can a point of light like an irradiated pore in the skin of the cosmos be an entire planet containing planets, as rich and complex as my own? And what does a worm see and feel, and who am I to deny the reality of any other being, even or especially when it contradicts my own narrow purview? This is how I grow: by being defeated by the immensity of the universe, the pointillism of fictions I was born into and will die unto. The fleeting sensitivity of this sack of flesh. From the point of view of a Douglas Fir tree, I will die tomorrow, so what will I make of life today?

One of the most moving aspects of meditation practice is the moment when I say to myself, begin again. The moment I realize I've lost awareness is the moment I (gently) step back into it. Knowing that my time is finite, but that I am training myself to take part in something which is immutable: the phases of the moon, the rising and setting of the sun, touching upon a way of being that is ancient. Feeling ancient feelings of awe as I let myself be bent by what is extraordinary and eternal, to paraphrase Rainer Maria Rilke.

I do, I undo, I redo1 is the vow of mature love. (Desperate love must be tamed lest I become yet another menace to society: a terrifying toddler in a grown up body, with grown up words, feigning agency.) By redo I mean submit to softening those jagged edges of my heart. To cease quivering in fear at the terrifying instability of life, gaping in shock at the loss of that which was once vital and essential. To tenderly bandage those wounds and praise the flesh that bleeds. To have the courage to befriend my intimate abyss, so that when I encounter the inevitable monstrosity within others I no longer freeze or fawn or fall apart but can calmly say, I know you. The brokenness in me makes my heart capacious enough to include the brokenness of you. As the poet Dean Young writes, nothing can be taken back/ not the leaves by the trees, the rain/ by the clouds. You want to take back/ the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel/ remains in the wound, some mud. Like scarab beetles born out of fetid excremental matter, the pus gushing from our primordial wounds wields a sacred, transformative power.

May you have the bowels to metabolize it.