journal entry: shrinking into vastness

There is much power in cultivating smallness - shrinking, contracting, degrading, dissolving: all seem to lead to infinity and a universal vastness that I seek as much as sunshine and solitude.


When I abate, so many things fall away - ego for sure, but also responsibility and guilt and worry. All that is left is the essential me, and that is not much. Just a small primordial pulse of longing and love. I recently learned that each persons's body has something like one teaspoon of the original matter from the big bang - so maybe that is my essence - a spoonful of concentrated star dust.


In the hours after the birth of each of my children, I had a wonderfully transcendent moment where I was awake, yet traveling within their bodies. I could fully feel what they were feeling, see through their eyes, and even move their muscles. Until, slowly - the occupation and connection faded. And we were separate. In order for the birth to be complete and successful and gentle - I had to shrink down, inhabit, and travel with my child's body just as they had inhabited mine.  The symbiotic relationship had to contract and swell and finally transform (sort of like the big bang).

I have a very similar experience when I am in the ocean. Bobbing in the water - far out - I become hyper focused on the light on the waves and the swells that pull my body along. I feel helplessly weak one moment and as if my body is determining the movement of all the seas the next. Almost like strings are connected all over me to places in the water - the top of a wave, the abysmal crags in the floor. It all becomes muddled as to who is controlling who.


The waves block the view of my family every few seconds, so it is as if I am looking at an old projected film, with jerky and sloppy timing revealing a banal narrative. My body and mind effortlessly attune to the salinity and soupiness of the sea. I am fully convinced that this is exactly how I will feel when I am dying and slipping from life into the unknown. It will be like floating in the sea and then effortlessly returning under to where tears, ocean water and blood, all taste the same.