I feel like I am a lemon drop being sucked on and getting smaller and smaller.
I spend lots more time dozing or just eyes-closed resting than I did a few months ago. (But maybe that’s the effect of trying out morphine every 4 hours for pain?) I have less and less energy for physical projects–i get worn out and have to rest or stop.
I am spending more time in bed during the day and less downstairs, where I have to admit it’s much harder to get comfortable. Only when my picky body is comfortable and I’ve been resting for half an hour or more can I stop trying to ease what hurts and feel like “a normal person.” Whatever that means.
I have less mental energy or stamina. I can feel my mind getting tired. It is hard to engage in conversations on complicated topics. For a month or two I have been confused about day of the week, day of the month, and even what month it is and which one comes next.
What I’m trying to explore here is what makes for that lemon-drop feeling of there being less and less of Me, the Unique Ellen, in contact with the world. I wonder if I will just melt away gradually.
Your tired mind still writes beautifully, and I am grateful that you can still share these difficult experiences so eloquently. You are and will forever be that Unique Ellen, no matter how in contact with the world you are. You know I don’t believe in many intangibles, but I do believe that.
Lovely Lemon Drop, sweet but with enough tangy edge to convey rich complexity and be uniquely delicious
This is a quote from a book I love very much. The author is Richard Moss.
“Often we have no idea how thoroughly we have identified with the future. It seems so normal to us to be always on our way to our lives, always almost there. Then suddenly we receive a call from the doctor with worrisome test results. With the specter of illness or even death before us, all our assumptions about what we would eventually be or do, all our dreams and plans – the picture of everything yet to unfold that we have taken for granted – can collapse in seconds, and with it our sense of self. The emptiness of the present in which we so rarely live can leave us in a state of desperation as we face the fear of non-being.
Some people continue to displace this fear into the future, imagining nonbeing after they die. others forestall it with beliefs about life after death. But the terror that grips most of us when our imagined futures are stripped away is really the sensation of nonbeing that we have never truly faced in the present.”
And yet the ‘enlightenment experience’ is also at times likened to being a sugar cube dissolved in warm water. What is ‘nonbeing’ as discussed above is then alternately named ‘unity consciousness’ when viewed from a different angle. The self is loosened from it’s profoundly habitual view of being a separate entity and immersed in something else, a different way of feeling and understanding what it is. Interestingly the sensation of the experience may be very similar but the interpretation of it through the lense of ‘ego loss ‘or that of ‘unity found’ radically changes one’s relationship to it.
We are not what we think we are. Emptiness can feel like freedom, connection, evoke awe and release.
We can’t necessarily control how we experience it but to be open to the possibility that dissolution is not something we know the truth about can make space for relaxing. Relaxing, floating in the warm water, kicking and paddling a bit just for the pleasure of movement, rolling and resting, getting rubbed away at the edges, relaxing.
I bow to all the feelings it can evoke to be a lemon drop, the painful and the vast. I add my love to yours and float with you when I can. You are a lovely lemon drop like no other that I have ever known and I am so profoundly sad to see you dissolving.there are no words for how much it hurts at times. I think that it will always hurt. But somewhere in that same- always-, you are not what I think you are and I can feel that like a shock of electric current through me. There is so much we do not know and cannot even approach with thinking.
Love you so.
Thank you, Gina. I will be coming back to this.