Collateral Damage and the 2nd Anniversary of My Mother's Suicide.

Ooh, how spicy are the consequences of public display in the blogosphere.  An angry ex.  A Jennlapse.   But at least the lunatic is writing again.  Yes, a few days ago we wrote the previous post, and a recent breakup had brought up feelings about that unattainable gal from Long Island that seems to always pop up on the periphery under circumstances of uncertainty.  Then a mysterious "friend" sent a link to that post to my beautiful ex-girlfriend here in Mountain town.  A sweet girl, a tumultuous relationship, another addiction that was nearly impossible to give up.  Are we just addicted to quitting?

For whatever reason, I've been conditioned to write about things that might be better kept private on this here blog that nobody reads.  And I'm glad to be back online.

So that brings us to the two year anniversary of Take off day.  I'm pretty sure that two years ago today, my brother, my mother, and I, were in Zurich.  When my brother and I left Switzerland, there were only two of the original traveling party still alive.  My mother had chosen to end her life, with dignity, grace, and steadfast bravery.  Scroll down for a couple years, (and I haven't written much the last few years), and you'll probably find a post about my mother's exit from her body bag.  I didn't keep that a secret either.  So, what you see is what you get.

Adios Mom.

FD  

Missing the Boat

Aloha, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and Jenn.  Boy did I ever not get this, it took me so long to understand.  Here I was, posting this picture, with this quote, on the Open Mind Project Facebook page, as though I had some understanding of it, or could have any claim to living up to it.  How very far from the truth.  Alas, I am one who has been guilty of loving in the least freedom giving sense.  It is the way I loved the girl I have never been able to forget about, but that I most certainly drove further from my heart, than her great geographic distance already had her placed.

I had to be loved with that needy desperation to understand how impossible and destructive of real love, it is to be in relationship with that need.  If "she," variously called the grouse, Jenn, the muse, the madness, etc, the one I never could quite forget about, ever did love me, I must have destroyed it early on.

But, does that mean that the love is gone?  I don't think so.  The end of love is the beginning of freedom.  The end of love is only an illusion, a mirage of loss.  Love never ends, just like nothing, in the real sense, ever ends.  Nothing is permanent, no life, no love, no human being, nothing mortal, alive, existent.  But Nothing, The Nothing, is itself permanent, in the sense of being the vessel of all existence.  The Great Nothing, the Void, Sunyata, or Emptiness, the space in which all matter exists, is the womb of all creation.  Just as the self is an illusion, in that no matter how deeply we look into our "selves" we, upon honest reflection, are likely to find no permanent, enduring self, a being separate from the consciousness which is experiencing and discerning life through it's limited scope of understanding, so to are disconnectedness, or ultimately impermanence, just an illusion, because in our most certain demise, our individual concepts of our "selves" will pass away, and what endures is the continuing thread of existence, whole, unified, and undifferentiated by the self-centered consciousness of I.  And so, we are always all in this together, infinite little miracles, particles of existence, integrally laced into the larger whole, which is itself at home in the vast emptiness that is the womb of everything.

Real Love, like Real God, or any other expression of that essence of beauty, truth, permanence, Importance, which we cannot express in our limited language, or as Anselm defined it: "that than which nothing greater can be conceived," cannot end.  Nor can it ever be effectively expressed by a need, a desperation, a self-centered feeling of lack, which seeks some external stamp of approval to fill it.  That love, which expresses itself as need, is also an illusory form of love, because it stems from an illusory self, a self that feels it needs something to make it complete.  So, instead of sending "her" another email, with this picture along with an apology for all the neediness, and self-centered illusion of love that I have been lambasting her with the last 15 years (including the last 3, which have consisted of a persistent effort to "leave that girl alone"), I wrote a blog post, in some hope (hopefully not a need) that she might find me pleased with her freedom, her smile, and happiness, if only glimpsed for a moment, in a glance at her Facebook page, and the view from her seat in the western wilderness. 

Good evening friends,

Franklin Delanor.