Inaugural Post (or the numero uno)

Hi. I've decided to initiate my blogging practice without letting anyone know. Perhaps in time others will find their way to these words, but for now I am using this as a way to encourage writing in my life. I have a manuscript that I worked on in the past. I know it is a particularly important piece of writing for me to complete, but for reasons that are difficult to discern, I have largely avoided the work involved in bearing it to its completion. Now writing that the reasons that prevent me from writing it are difficult to discern is a little bit more than disingenuous. Because I am precisely the reason that prevents me from writing. Somehow, I am convinced that continuing to work on the manuscript will devour me. In a way, it will. Completing it will require me giving up a part of my past. These memories have been very important to me because I've believed that they have a talismanic significance in relation to my personal identity. Therefore, the logic continues, to give these memories up in writing would entail me letting go a signficant aspect of what makes me who I am. And even though I know these justifications are really just how I let myself not work on something important, it is still difficult to know how to begin again upon a piece of work that has lain dormant for some time and requires a new kind of work and vision.

Vision is a really appropriate word for this task. I need to revise, to resee what I have already done in a way that connects with a seeing this work to completion. I am already seeing how this space is capable of generating connection. Writing about the difficulties of reinitiating this project helps me to see how I can do this very thing.

Here is a quote I read last night by Bassui (upon comforting a dying person):

Your essence was not born and will not die. It is neither being nor nonbeing. It is not a void nor does it have form. It experiences neither pleasure nor pain. If you ponder what it is in you that feels the pain of this sickness, and beyond that you do not think or desire or ask asnything, and if your mind disssolves like vapour in the sky, the the path to rebirth is blocked and the moment of instant release has come.