This Terrible Love, a journal of nonduality

Sometimes I wonder if any new words will pop up in the apparent Miranda thingie candy apple brain. (Note the punctuation—not the “Miranda thingie’s” candy apple brain, as there is no Miranda who has one). It often feels like the song, "What do we do when there are no more words/we just sit in the park and sing with the birds." But writing is a habit; posting online feels like the letters I used to send home to family and friends. The silent retreat is over, so finally I can get some peace and quiet around here. lol Though it is literally quieter as the retreat-attendees were often making music. But beyond that, you realize how simply the human presence carries a whole language with it, even if unspoken. Body language, movements, grunts, and exclamations of pleasure or tears. And the internal dialogues that were unheard but almost visible on faces. Imagined as that story is.  So while it was virtually wordless, it was not really silent at all, as the voice of ...

  We were standing at the edge of the lake, at the end of what we call a day, and my candy apple brain was sending me images of light filtering through clouds and reflecting off the water---clouds and water, these things I had learned to name and to see. It was an almost impossible swirl of delicate colors and streaks of luminosity. Fiona, the girl I had learned to call by a name as well, stood nearby; we had walked here together. I looked over at her, and saw tears on her face. She looked back. I nodded towards the sky, thought of the fragile beauty bringing her tears. She said, “No, it’s just…there’s no words. Can’t be said. What they call…'this'...” She started to stretch out her arms as if to indicate all that appeared, then stopped and shook her head. "No, no…" I said, in apparent agreement, then my voice trailed off. She looked back at me, a few feet away across an impenetrable distance that didn’t even exist. "An' we can’t even shar...

  For a long time in the life of this Miranda thingie, it seemed there was a world divided into beauty and non-beauty, things and people that were “beautiful” and those that were “not beautiful.” The Miranda mother once told me at a relatively young age that I was “very pretty but not beautiful.” Mother would always classify the dancers in her daughter’s class according to their looks, and let me know who were the “real” beauties. When a young man would say I was beautiful, I would correct him, remembering my mother’s words.    But one strange day, the whole world of what was “beautiful” and “not beautiful” seemed to change, and all that appeared began to somehow transform itself into a kind of beauty that was radiant, luminous, and far beyond any idea of beauty that I ever had. Somehow, “this” happened --- madness or liberation; the names seem not to touch it but only make it sound like something happened to someone, and that is felt to be as real as the stories of Littl...

  From time to time, someone writes that they feel a deep connection with me and are sincerely and even desperately seeking this that I seem to speak about. Sometimes they are ones who have only written me, other times I met them at a retreat or in my past apparent travels. One man wrote that it was as if we who speak of this lived in another world. But there is only one world, and not even that. Yet the world of separation has become a fable of ghosts and phantoms, held together by beliefs, as dramatic and filled with emotion and seeming turmoil as any fairy tale, and no less nor more real. Sometimes one who believes in a separate self imagines I can love them and help them find what they think I have. But the love that I know would only break their heart and destroy them, not complete them as they imagine. I do not live in a world they can ever understand, though it is more accurate to say that none live in a world any imagined one can ever comprehend. And there is no way t...

  All the words keep writing themselves, but it happens more often that when people send messages asking a question about what I’ve written, I have to go back and read what was posted. It doesn’t seem like I have written anything at all. I wonder what the doctors will say as I lay in the nursing home at the not-quite-young age of 32 with a self-diagnosed case of nonduality-induced senility. “What creates the character?” asks the young man who is working on figuring this out. He has watched “almost the all videos on the nothing TV channel you recommend me. I am knowing more each time I watching.” He is not a native English speaker, and sometimes I love to hear the way English sounds when it is put together like puzzle pieces. Though more and more that is how it always sounds. I write back that the character was dreamed up, by what I could not say, though more than once in the apparent past I would say "life." But that was really no better an answer than saying everything and n...