Where am I?

Somehow I’ve ended up house sitting in Shangri-la, up in the clouds, surrounded by quiet. This house is a gift, a blessing, a treasure. It is absolutely beautiful on the inside, but the killer beauty is just outside. The house is situated all alone looking directly out onto the front range of the Rockies which appear soft and distant and cool. The house is owned by dharma practitioners and they have an amazing library. Certainly every dharma book I’ve ever read is here, plus hundreds I wish I’d read. I’ve been writing, practicing meditation, reading, cooking, and sleeping.

So it’s heaven, yes? Yes. And also not. While it’s mostly a paradise of solitude, I do have one constant companion who is bugging the crap out of me. I simply cannot escape my own company. Without husband, friends, traffic, and Project Runway reruns to cushion the blow of my own personal neurosis, I have to take the brunt of it. I have so much self-doubt. I am afraid of the dark. I hesitate to give my all to anything: to my writing, my practice, my trust in myself. I see how I’m always holding back, which is easy to do now that I’m in a place where there is absolutely no reason to hold back–no others to attend to, no interruptions, nothing dictating my time, no reason not to pour myself body and soul into what I love most: study, practice, contemplating, and then attempting to be creative with these three things by writing. It makes me very sad that I don’t love myself more than this, but apparently I do not. Why? I don’t know.

I’ve been here 5 days. I wonder what it will feel like on day 10 or 19 or, at the end, on day 30.

categorized in: creativity, dharma