Madness as a talisman and waves of potentiality

We become as surfers on a cosmic wave of potentiality, and all we can do is ride it out

The path of recovery is paved with relapses and peppered with pitfalls, I’m finding. The tiger traps of my mind. I encounter them after certain triggers or epiphanies and it takes me hours, sometimes days, to climb out again. Yesterday and today. As I process, I leave this with you from this morning. A wandering bit, but important to me.

I should write, the voices tell me in my head. This morning that’s the one that seems to sway me more than the others, which are usually a dark cacophony of intersecting, interjectionally negative, imagined vocalizations of the seemingly hundreds of voices filling my headspace. So much noise that as I am awakening, I am finding very little room for my own voice and it hurts in a profound way to remain present. What does it even sound like in the sea of confusion that otherwise laps at the edges of my mind? I don’t hear sounds, per se, but inklings of the memories of voices all abuzz, all at once, all a titter about something or other. Most of the time they seem filled with fear and doubt. This morning, though, the voice that says “write” comes forward the most. The urgent but faint, soft voice of a distant memory of something important.

As I wandered as a child, expanded in adolescence, and tried to integrate as a young man, the rigidity of the container into which I had been dropped at birth refused to give way, to bend, to allow me room to grow how I needed. Constraint of place and actions by entities also rooted in this place warped my mind early on, forging it against the grain, bending until I cracked. It’s given me thoughts that aren’t mine, poisoned and trampled my soul, and taught me how to “man”.

My madness is in me, born outside and injected before I knew it. I was trained into this through narrowing growth paths, cognitive dissonance, and just the right amount of cosmic dust. Though it could have led to other eventualities, other placements, it didn’t. All of that led me here.

My growth patterns up to now weren’t mine. They were prescribed to me despite their negative impact on my soul. And they are patterns that can no longer serve me. But being born in the place I was, at the time I was, made me what I am for the future. I have no choice but to be the entity writing this paragraph. It has all led to this.

So what I do from here is most important. Eschewing the forming patterns of before and adopting curiosity beyond the pain of mindfully being here is the secret to a new path, the way out. We are tempered and drawn into the now by our experiences in the past, and the forging fires of those personal histories reveal the nature of our potential in the now. We are forged by past experience and free to explore the future as an alchemically new entity.

We become as surfers on a cosmic wave of potentiality, and all we can do is ride it out, shift our weight enough to find the best path along the crest. We have to stay at the crest or risk being swept under. Do some tricks while we’re still upright, and enjoy the opportunity to feel the cool water on our bodies as the wave ends or we lose our balance. My madness is with me as I surf along this crest into the next one as a talisman. A reminder of my right to ride the waves beyond the patterns that gifted me my insanity and rise into a new matrix of perception.