1:59 in the morning. Sunday. I’ve been awake at least an hour. Went to bed at 10:30. Do the math. Calling it sleep, too generous.
Yesterday felt like my best day in months. Drove to La Jolla Cove. Laid in the grass. Watched the sea lions and the lifeguards. I will never go in those caves. Walked neighborhoods with no destination and no hurry.
Held hands through the mountains. Stopped for coffee. Ate on a porch over the Pacific. Planned a trip to Italy we’ll probably never take. Talked about our future. Money. Weekends planned. Next adventures.
Work. Why does the conversation always drift back? We try to pull back, change the subject. Fail. Unfinished. Undone. Incomplete. More. More. More.
They say that’s how it all works.
The word hustle kills a part of me off every time I hear it. Chopped liver.
This might be the most stressful time we’ll ever go through, my husband says. I flinch. Careful. Better to not believe such things out loud. Something is always listening and it will come collect.
Why do I always feel I owe more? Recurring waves of unworthiness, followed by unbridled moments of ego. Fuck.
I’ve just devoured Pico Iyer’s new book Aflame. There’s a line in it, roughly, that says God is calling us all the time and we just don’t take the time to pick up the phone.
Is that why I’m awake?
What God?
Without thinking, I put my dharma wheel necklace back on a few weeks ago. I’ve noticed I keep wearing it outside my shirt and keep fucking with it, in meetings, on the couch, when I wake up.
Last week, I found myself redesigning the cover of my new book into a dharma wheel without knowing why.
A ringing, Pico might call it.
Recognition of the ringing keeps coming. Why does it always come from behind the doors I’m not opening?
Group meditation, Insight of the Desert. I’m sitting in the silence and I start to overheat. Every time I crack my eyes the digital thermostat hasn’t moved even a degree.
I thanked the leader afterward for the three seconds of her thirty-minute guided meditation I actually heard before the torrents of thought inside me cooked through.
I have an old Sufi friend I don’t entirely trust because he has three wives and I have never once been able to figure it out. He’s taught me more about no-self than anyone, in a single conversation, over biscuits and vegan sausage gravy ( not a thing ).
I’d told him I was learning to run long, training for the Marine Corps Marathon, and explained that the grueling part was the last stretch and I’d found a mantra for it. I am running. Over and over in my cadence. I am running, I am running, I am running.
I was proud of it. It really helped.
“Well there’s your whole problem,” he says.
“Try Tyler is running and see how it goes.”
I was furious for days.
But sitting, overheating in a room full of perfect meditators — the Lululemon, the posture, the peaceful faces, me failing again, unable again, full of thinking again — I started saying, Tyler is thinking.
Tyler is thinking, Tyler is thinking, Tyler is thinking.
An hour of that.
At the end, drunk on how well I’d practiced the dharma of non-self, overwhelmed by how that simple shift shifted me, I proudly announced the technique to the room.
Gave my friend no credit whatsoever.
I woke Monday with my back temporarily at ease because I’d preemptively chugged 800 milligrams of ibuprofen with disregard, telling myself I’m easing off.
Felt a sudden need to be held. Grant rolled over and held me.
He just knew, the way he always does.
Four snooze buttons later I walk into the living room and dread slips in through my mouth and fills my belly.
I’d rested and played all weekend and now all I can think about is how not to work.
Waking, slathered in a morning grease that has to be burned off, sucks.
Run. Athletic greens. Coffee. Writing. Meditation.
The grease usually lingers until about five minutes into my first session. I won’t feel anything again until halfway through the day, reaching for caffeine and food I eat too fast. Tums for the win.
My best self arrives in my calls. I’m so useful and connected. Flow state, some assholes call it.
Tyler is working, Tyler is working, Tyler is working.
The dread passes, but so do other things. The commitment to silence. The longing for slower and simpler. The remembrance of the practices that saved me.
Rubik-mother-fucking-cube. The spiritual life, Aflame.
What I’ve got left by Tuesday is only four words.
I’ve been so far underwater in meetings lately that I’ve regressed to infant language.
How can I help, How can I help, How can I help?
I was ashamed of it until I noticed it’s genius.
It gets at what they didn’t ask me that they should have. It gets at what they did ask that I’d never have thought of. It can’t be planned in advance, which is the entire point because the version of me that plans what to say is the version that already decided what you need before you opened your mouth.
You can’t humble somebody from that question.
You have to wait and find out.
I should do a podcast about my new super question, another tool in my chest, to stack on top of the last one, which I’d share if I could remember it.
There it is again. The owing. Damn.
Woke up Wednesday to learn Big Sur is Aflame. Mandatory evacuations and 500 structures in danger. I wonder if Nepenthe will still serve that Ambrosia Burger?
The monks up at New Camaldoli need five million dollars for their new road.
Colombia had an earthquake last week.
Another drone shot down over Russia, or was it Ukraine? I’m so confused.
And the algorithm wants me arguing about who’s allowed where.
Pico says to hear the ringing and answer the call, we need six half hours in silence, and then another three hours after that.
I’m going to try it. Again.
Pico Iyer’s Aflame is here. Read it with me.
I love you. Keep going.
Tyler
When looking to a spiritual path for light, I've found it many times. In looking for the path of wholeness, there is plenty of dark. Duality. Liminality must linger between the light and the dark. I don't really want to push away the dark or just chase the light. I'm interested now in wholeness. The great grappling with matters of divinity and awe is a life-long, ever changing endeavor. And isn't it grande?
I love YOU. Let's keep going.