THE GREAT WALL, part 1
It’s a real thing and yet it has no actual form. I can feel it especially when I sit for an evening meditation. My breath slows and deepens, my spine gradually corrects itself into perfect alignment as my attention turns inward and my thoughts chase the cloudy wisps of nothingness. I become darkness, become nothingness, and swim towards the promise of eternal, expansive peace. And yet, without fail, I am always stopped by the Wall.
If I were to locate the Wall in my body I would place it’s roots somewhere deep within my right shoulder. From there it slithers upwards, like a long black leech, into my neck and then into my right cranium – and it causes me a variable degree of discomfort in my day-to-day life.
When I approach the Wall in a meditative state, however, I realize that it is made of nothing and does not exist in my physical body at all. And yet it does.
Let me put it like this: the pain I experience in my physical body is only a metaphor for the Wall in my subconscious, not the other way around. The Wall existed first, and has chosen to express itself, for one reason or another, as a long dark snake of pain, shoulder to cranium. Not unlike a poet writing a poem, my Wall manifests pain.
