Defeat/ed
CH here. It’s September 2, 2018, I'm sitting in my Los Angeles apartment, typing on a laptop that keeps reminding me I'm running out of space, drinking cold coffee with my feet up and wishing I had been sharing more of the enclosed writings of a Girl, enclosed up.
My mind feels exactly where it should be. It feels like it’s planted down, with soil (I typed soul just then, freud), yes soil and soul. The mind, my mind, has been pushing against my skull for many mornings, wanting to find a place for it to be heard, respected, loved, cared for, doted on, listened to, loved again.
I’ve been doing a lot of listening to my spirit, I’ve been thanking it and coddling it. My mind is jealous. It’s all connected I know, but something clicked this morning, I guess the soul found it’s plant, or the earth found it’s universe to live inside of, both felt symmetrical and both read the other’s face...they were both sad. Sad is a puny word, and feels like a victim puddle, maybe it’s more like defeated, but in a resolved way.
I'm resolved to be defeated right now. Just for right now.
That's what my spirit told my mind and my mind told my spirit. It's a beautiful place, defeat. Quiet and cold like a pillow turned over on my bed...ready to be used. Defeated, defined as "having been beaten in a battle" "demoralized and overcome by adversity" ... Again, it's a beautiful place, defeat. I'm noticing I type Defeat rather than Defeated which makes me thing about past and present. Defeated being in the past and defeat being present, the beautiful part might just be that tiny difference.
I was overcome and defeated. Now, the defeat is over and it's the moment after.
It’s beautiful how I can think something and then that next second of life Happens, for that thought to be immediately tested. To practice, right away. Life keeps going no matter the thought or the defeat. I do believe, even when we are truly defeated by age or health or something worse, we do not truly die, our Us, our Next within us keeps going.
Yes, but what of the mind, that force that keeps pumping thought after thought and making map after map, does that go with us too?
I’m doing much differentiating. Well, archaeological mining. It all lives inside of me. And the word “spirit” and “mind” are words we made up to label a vision, a mosaic. But, similar to the way the Greeks made Gods to signify love and war and jealously and power, we label the spirit and the mind and the body and the chakras and the feelings and the evil. We have words for all the parts. Words for the shifting shadows of existence.
There is a great sun somewhere that shifts our shadows and, doesn't it seem, sometimes, we can't catch the shadow right when it appears? Because the sun shifted again. And we are chasing our existence like Peter Pan chases it's true reflection.
And my mind feels heard and loved and best friends with my spirit. For right now, they are married. For today. And my body is their baby they protect and love and need it to survive. As poetic and lyrical as my fingers feel, words fail to paint the calligraphy in my head. Shaking the tree branches for signs of life...what of the soul soil?
Let the leaves slowly fall to the ground then, for the moment after defeat seems rainy and refreshing.
+
Lines I jotted down from my mind to my spirit to you over last few months out here:
Make sure to choose my life and not settle for it.
Without imperfections the universe wouldn’t have been made.
Support me unless I’m destroying myself.
Poison, it’s poison and it kills me and I die and become a monster zombie and I can’t remember anything because I am dead and then I’m brought back to life when it leaves my body, if it leaves my body.
I’m allowed to not be mad at myself.
I was being confiscated. And I resolved to be that. The paranoia of trapped forever.
The mystery is Divine.
But every second of change isn’t better or worse, it’s a collective.
+
"This alone is denied to God: The power to undo the past.” - Agathon.
"The truly free individual is only free to the extent of her own self mastery" - Socrates.
++
