Floating Down the Stream of Consciousness.

I love books. I love to own books. I love the look, smell and feel of books. I love to read and I really love to disappear into a book as I read it. I call it a “good book” when it captures my imagination and as I fall into the pages I am swept away like a leaf from the cottonwood tree falls into the river and is swept away on the current of the river I call life. I can feel it as I write this. I love being swept away by life.
I am passionate about witnessing the mystery of life and I am fascinated by the language we use to attempt to capture the essence of the experience we call life. Few authors can do that for me in a manner that enfolds me in my imagination. I love it when it happens. I aspire to perfecting that skill for myself.
My spiritual practice is to relax into the talent of connecting with the mystery of life and skillfully expressing myself from that place. There must be a Chinese symbol for what I am talking about, a Myers-Briggs type, an ennegram assigned to it, an astrological phenomena, a cultural behavior ingrained in me, a genetic code, a parental mistake, a sibling placement, a goddess archetype, a spirit guide, patron saint or an animal totem. There must be a way to explain why I am like this.
I am not sure why I want to write a book myself. There are plenty of them already out there. And now there are e books “on line”. Magazines are on line too. Newspapers are on line. I am on line, for Heaven’s sake. I can be googled, twittered, xinged and chatted up.
But you know there is a comfort I get from propping a good book up on my knees while I read. I especially like doing it during the day. And I absolutely love falling asleep that way. I love to fall asleep reading during the day. Now that I mention it, reading is my most powerful “sleep-aid” at night too. And when I awaken in the middle of the night, guess what I do…I read myself back to sleep.
But I do. I do want to write a book. There are a lot of things I want to do in fact. Some of them I have done once already and want to do again. I want to understand the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. I want to build a row boat. I want to see a bear again. I want to find an eagle’s feather. I want to take a sleigh ride on a packed trail in deep snow in the mountains while I am covered with buffalo robes and blankets. I want to be a princess. I want to make a lot of money. I want to taste fine wine and eat at an exquisite restaurant. I want to sit on the ground and pray. I want to go to a Buddhist temple in Thailand. I want to understand the creative spark I felt when Rio was conceived.
I want to love myself. I realized today that if I continue to believe that the people I love will hurt me and betray me, (because that is my story and my experience) I will never allow myself to love myself because if I do betrayal and pain are inevitable. Isn’t it natural for me to also want to avoid pain to this magnitude at all cost? I want to release that belief and forgive those that have harmed me and open to self love and relinquish my tenacious grasp on my heart. I really want that. If I can do that, why, I can write a book.