The Love Umbrella

Every now and then I crash. One moment I’m breezing along without a care in the world; the next I’m violently plummeting the icy dark depths of despair.

It’s all in my head, I know it is, but knowing it doesn’t make the slightest bit of a difference.

I know too, for example, that everything solid on the physical plane is mostly made up of empty space, but it doesn’t make getting out of handcuffs any easier.

That’s what it feels like – imprisonment. Like I’ve been kidnapped by this toxic entity in the middle of my soul. It’s a tumour: a big black maw slathering on my awareness.

I want to get rid of it, really I do. I want to cut it out, surgically. I’d rather have a hole in my soul than this fucking thing.

If I didn’t know any better, I could believe I was possessed. And in a sense, I am. Not by any demon, but by my own ego, which is struggling for supremacy.

My ego wants to separate me from you. It wants me to believe we’re different. It wants me to believe that we’re not the same stuff, the stuff of the universe, the stuff of God.

It wants me to feel threatened; to lash out; to fear; to hate.

It wants to make me forget my true nature, which is the nature of God.

A friend of mine told me that in every moment we have a choice: to stand under the umbrella of fear, or the umbrella of love. And she was right.

If sobriety and the twelve step program have taught me anything, it’s that my thinking is nonsense; a random cacophonic stream over which I have little control. And knowing that means that I can step out of it, and observe it rushing by. And when I observe it, I notice a few things. It has no rhyme or reason. It has no basis in reality. It channel-hops. It contradicts itself.

If I'm looking for the truth, I certainly won’t find it there.

So here I stand, under the love umbrella, waiting for the storm to pass. I’ve never been here before, and I’ll never be here again. Maybe I should’ve brought a camera.