Appreciating Absence
I remarked on it again today, in a tesla self-driving through the California mountains--how safe I feel all the time.
I used to feel major anxiety driving and in cars.
I let so much of it go, I thought I had let all of it go.
But no, I reflect these days on how safe I feel in cars, not just in the mountains with a trusted driver and fancy computers but in major cities in Uber rides.
That anxiety is just gone.
SO much fear and anxiety is palpably missing, but was I even fully feeling it to notice it?
It's like when the refrigerator stops doing whatever I got used to it doing and real silence infuses the house. Wow, something definitely was there that was a lot louder than this.
Where did it go? What drove it away?
I've done so many things, so much work on inner and outer alignment. It could not be any one of these things.
It's the symphony they play together, that there's nobody about to unload their emotional drama on me, that there are so many people around who are aligned and nourished and self responsible and just wanna play in peace with me, that I'm eating healthy foods, that I'm in the sunshine outside at least 2 hours every day, that I'm walking long miles through the forests, that I live in the woods in a friendly small town, that I rarely drive and hardly ever in traffic, that I drink water and bathe in the natural flows of it.
The drive was not the end of my astonishment.
Like every day with the living waters, I was blown away by the beauty of the trees, the boulders, the pebbles, the waterfalls, the ripples, the eddies, the sheen, the flow, the rock layers, the moss coverings, the fern fuzzes. HOW do I live in this astonishing improbable beauty? How do I appreciate it *enough* for what it is? Am I seeing everything? Did I really see it all?
Out loud, I said, "it's Thursday."
Thursday. This is a weekday in my normal ass life that has diverged from every norm in a way you have to look closely to notice.
Something is working.
Something is humming along, or else a latent humming has suddenly ceased.
The quiet of alignment has boredom. It has unreasonable amounts of party, play, leisure, and rest. It has work I experience as play. It has large quantities of the highest quality time with my loved ones. It has me realize later that I've been a workaholic, when the whole time I was judging myself for fucking off geeking out with writing and ignoring the rest of the world. But all my "work" is just spinning along...
It's an absolute trip. An unfathomable dream, one I've remembered since birth as a taste in my mouth, all the details lost on waking.
It's here now. It's right here, right now.
It's here now and I have it.
Am I appreciating it enough?
Am I really SEEING it all?
