Fighting the Frost

The weather lately has been a good metaphor for how I feel about life in general. It goes something like this:

"Here comes Spring! So much vitality rising up within to prepare for a new season of light and growth! It's getting warmer, and warmer, and... oh, crap. Another frost? You CAN'T be serious!"

Yes, this is the story of my life lately -- a slow, steady increase of inner warmth, inner light, inner fire, while the outside world remains just as cold and cruel as ever, if not more so.

It's mostly a good thing, really. Feeling this fiery passion burning inside me reminds me of just how far I've come in reclaiming my emotions and releasing my pent-up vitality from the prisons of propriety and shame. The passion itself, and the associated appreciation of beauty and humanity and the Earth, is a blessing that I wouldn't trade for anything. But the contrast between what I'm experiencing internally and externally leaves me feeling a very restless pressure to do something, ANYTHING, to change my outward circumstances for the better.

There are no words for what I feel... but all I have available to me at the moment is words, so let me try in vain to explain it all because I feel compelled to say something.

Loving non-attachment is so much more powerful than I would have ever believed possible! I've always had a great love in my heart... but for the longest time, my heart was ruled by fear. I wanted desperately to love, but I was afraid that love would lead to pain and suffering, so I held back, waiting for the right moment. Then I learned an important truth:

The right moment is now.

Now is the time to let go of all of your fears and surrender yourself to the power of your own love. Tomorrow never comes; now is always with you; and the price of a life without the full presence of your love is more terrible than any pain and suffering that love may supposedly bring. And whether you can feel it right now or not, your love is a tremendous force longing to spring forth from the core of your being. Embrace it now, if only for a moment, in whatever ways you can, and your real life with start today.

It's taken me years, but I'm going deep and deeper into the bottomless depths of loving non-attachment. The more I let go of my fears, doubts, and inhibitions, the more beauty I see in the world, and the more love I feel. As time goes on, my experience of the world is evolving into a prolonged ecstatic experience.

Pretty cool, eh?

Dullness to my surroundings is transformed into a glimpse of the sky. The sky is transformed into a sunrise. The sunrise is transformed into a breathtaking palette of colors and textures. Colors and textures evolve into a mystical poetic synesthesia, as I look up at the heavens and experience a profound kinesthetic sense of the divine beauty of earth and sky. And even then, the experience evolves further, with my appreciation of divine beauty triggered through conversations with friends, or a particularly colorful wall, or even a ridiculously mundane banner ad on MySpace.

On an intellectual and spiritual level, I've been certain for a long time now that we human beings have the potential to do so much more with our lives than we are currently doing. But as I let go of my barriers to love, this becomes more than a matter of impersonal understanding. Instead, it deepens into a profoundly personal experience -- an emotional and physical sense of what life could be like, and would be like, if only we chose differently.

In these moments, I feel such tremendous clarity of purpose that I ought to be able to move mountains with the sheer power of my ecstatic energy. But there's still something getting in the way... either the sheer force of 6 billion other humans is holding me back, or the particulars of the revolutionary path from today's reality to a better reality are still not clear or correct enough yet in my mind to enact change effectively.

Really, I think it's a combination of the two.

Either way, I've been feeling lately like I'm about to burst. I've had some exceptional times with my friends lately, and that's helped to keep me sane... I love my friends dearly, and my time with them has been part of the inspiration for this deepening ecstatic experience of the world. But since none of it has really served to shift the overall circumstances of my life and community, I find a core of frustration building that no amount of directionless good times can release.

What I crave is a way to take all of this passion and channel it into some constructive means of creating positive change in my life and my community. My passion is a tremendous energy source... an inner sun that only grows in power with time. What I'm looking for is a way to focus this energy like a laser, and possibly combine it with the energies of other like-minded individuals in pursuit of some cooperative, revolutionary, community goals.

As usual, I've got a few ideas along these lines... but it's going to take some serious conversations with good friends before I can figure out which of these ideas may actually be practical and effective at creating change.

In the meantime, this entry has helped... but I'm still feeling restless. So, I'm off in search of revolution...