Travelling deep into emptiness

This is a piece I wrote last week when I went down very, very deep again.   Often I am not aware of what is brewing deep within me, only that today the realisation came to me that the lower I go the higher I rise until one day I find myself out on open plane no longer littered with as many old ghosts as have blanketed my way through deep, dark shadows before :

Today I spiralled down into a great feeling of emptiness, within myself I felt such an enormous tiredness  and  weariness with the circumstances and surroundings of my life, a sense of ending and decay too.  It was seemingly impossible to engage in the world and so for a time I surrendered to emptiness, to stillness, to being with the emptiness.  Until a part of me longed to reach out again.

What I learned after several phone calls was that all that was wanting to be was emptiness, what it was asking of me was just to be, but the running monolgue that visits me was back, how little I have achieved and how painful it was yesterday to sit with my Mum and see the affect of the drugs, how painful to have a communication cuffufle, but also how essential it is for me to face reality and make my peace with it.

But beneath that were deeper feelings, a recognition that I am tired and that on some level a part of me needs to bring an old way of being to an end, needs to stop trying and putting my energy in the places that only end up making me feel emptier.  I am not dead yet, do I want this feeling of living death to go on?  Is it really me or just something I enter from time to time, something far deeper than me?  All I can hope is that this is the final descent, the final realisation that changes need to happen next year and new ways to express be found.

It’s too negative a view to believe there is no light out there in a damaged world and yet everywhere those of us who are awake and aware can see the damage,  but there needs to be more.  More connection, more love, more reaching out.  At times it seems to me that we are in the death throws of the old year and old ways of being.  Painful events have gone down, there is rumbling about a deep sense of disillusionment with new leaders.  Can we find hope and truth outside, can we let our pain teach us what depletes us and must be given up or surrendered?  Can we shed the old skin and bear being naked and unprotected for a time on the brink of the new? Can we? Can I?