Sara

From my Buddhist Wisdom Inspiration Cards:






Like the wind
not caught by any net,
in solitude we gain
peace and balance.

I cannot argue with you here, Buddha Box. Not really. I know that the first step in attaining anything successful is to be able to find peace and happiness and love within and for yourself. I know this. It seems to be the simplest and hardest journey of them all, though, to be able to do that. Because whether you want to or not, whether you mean to or not, there are things you hide away from even yourself. There are boxes of memories and rooms of feeling and stacks of regret that you barricade off and quarantine because it's easier to exist that way. Who can face everything that has made them happy or sad or angry over all their years and be healed? Who can face that mountain every day?

Perhaps the point is to face all of that, come to terms with it and then let it go. There's where I hit the catch. I have a very hard time letting anything go. I dwell on things for days, month, years. Sometimes it seems like I dwell on things forever. I never let go. I don't like letting to. Not even when we're talking about letting go of something that stings and bites my hands and heart whenever I try to touch it. It hurts, but it's my hurt. I own it. It can always wound me so deep that I feel like staggering and just falling to my knees with the weight of it.

I'm the sort of person who still has notes from high school classes tucked away in a box somewhere. I've done purges. I have. I have thrown away things with sentimental value because I finally realized that they were just objects. It was still hard, and I replaced them with a new set of objects to attach feelings to. Not just pain but happiness and joy and regret and love. I use objects like touchstones. On top of my desk is a Buffy glass with Spike on it. It's Season 2 "School Hard" Spike with the deadly cheekbones and the black and red ensemble. It's not just a Spike glass gathering dust on top of my desk, though. It's a day spent in Edinburgh, walking from our hotel room around the city, down the lanes and finding ourselves at a mall. It's passing a man playing a bagpipe and selling his CDs on the street. It's a time machine to a handful of days, and it's right there within reach. It's the same with so many other little things that I keep.

I'm a tactical person who doesn't like to be touched. I don't like the unexpectedness of someone else touching me. I prefer to touch people. I offer hugs or pats on the back or shoulders. I'll play with your hair or give you a back rub. And you are to let me alone. I assign people and places and times and ideas to objects. I name them. I personify them, and I count on them in strange ways.

So even though I am alone most days when I don't work, I am always surrounded by people as long as these things are around me. My little metal sculpture of Stonehenge when the sun was out, and we goofed around taking pictures in front of a ring of stone. It was a day where we watched Bjorn take a picture of her foot with Stonehenge. It was a bus ride going through a town where there were just mannequin heads in a window. It's a music store. It's people.

I know, Buddha Box. You would have me cast off the clutter and the weights and the ties. You would have me meditate on myself as myself rather than myself as I am with certain people because I am everything and everyone. I have a legion of faces and methods and moods. I am who you need or want me to be. I am soft and pliable. I want to please you because you can make me feel needed and wanted and loved. I don't know what shape to take to please myself. It's something I should work on and something that scares me to death all at the same time how I can manage to be all and nothing with almost the same breath.

I have always been so scared of being nothing.