The dark night of the unknown. The steps one knows one has to take and the associated fear.

Responsibility.

I feel this is the heart of meditation: Simply being interested in what is here – being more interested in what is… than in what was, what will be, or what should be.

Toni Packer

The dog, snoring at my feet. Loud chatter coming through the wall from next door. The smell of coffee and of smoke from the unlit fire. A new, different kind of silence in the absence of clanging tinnitus.

Even the same things are new in each moment.

The silence of not knowing.

No doer nor nothing to be done.

No thought can improve what is already here.

We don’t have ideas, ideas have us.

Carl Jung

In times of trauma I have no idea what I’m doing except somehow saving myself.

Sitting, wondering at the beauty of existence but also inquiring into the horrors here too.

Pain yet complete aliveness.

What is the duration of this moment? Does it last only until the the next instance of inattention?

This is always it.

Roaring tinnitus this morning in my now blocked, deaf left ear. My experience of the world is now temporarily different and yet the open awareness of it remains clear and unchanged.

A solitary lamp illuminating the corner of the room. Ringing, hissing tinnitus; shrill, clean and precise.

I am very lucky to have a job in which I spend most of the time in a state of flow. No distracting, pointless, discursive inner monologue. Someway, somehow my usual identity of self falls away and ‘I’ cease to do the work but instead am the work.