12/40: Spaciousness

A suffering that social media are good at amplifying is craving attention, likes, comments, and followers. What if letting it go were a way to enjoying the endless field of spaciousness?

Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies 1, trans. by Stephen Mitchell

There is a freedom in writing when very few are paying attention. You could say that is a way for me to console myself and on one level you would be absolutely right. A part of me fears invisibility and inaudibility above all things because if I am not seen and heard, do I even exist?

At the same time I know how much suffering can come from a surfeit of attention. And it’s more than just whether or not people read posts and comment. It is that when I write self-consciously thinking of this person or that reading, it twists the writing from what it can be without that into attempts to please others, to gain applause.

I am the only one in this space where I write. The cat has sloped off in his feline disgust of the human who sits like a stone and then taps fingers on a keyboard on and on without regard for his petitions to sniff the outside air for seconds before cat-swearing and begging to be let back in. The clock ticks serenely. The morning chorus of birds has subsided to the odd tweet here and there as I slept in very late today and it is after 8 a.m. Light streams in from the picture window.

I listen intently to hear what else there is to write.

But that’s it. Spaciousness.