Therapy

I am skipping stones across the water. Some go further than others. The cold of the sand is seeping through my trousers. I want to go home but I have to wait for my ride.

I hope she is coming back for me. I know I am hard to misunderstand but does a good heart count for nothing?

It is growing dark and the dampness of an autumn evening is settling in. I don't know whether I should wait any longer.

But if I start walking home, will she see me on the road or drive straight past?

If she is not coming back, I am better off walking. If I don't set off soon, it will be very dark and the roads are not lit.

There is a moment when the person leaves you, just a moment, when you would pay all you have to be able to touch them on the shoulder and say, no, really, forget all that and start at this point.

I am brushing down my trousers. I don't hear a car. I begin to walk away from the sea.

***

There is a point of stillness, a time when the focus is intense enough to dissolve my being, removing intention. I am no longer feeling her shoulders. I have become the intensity of the stroke.

I have mentioned this before.

But it's something I often think about. I can't rationalise it. I couldn't do it, couldn't induce it. I used to meditate when I was a child and could remove myself from the current but if I try the same thing now, the stillness is filled by the onrush of things I already spend too much time thinking about.

Massage is not like sex because the involvement in sex is for me, and detachment in good massage is for them.

Or is it? I think it is for them because it is not the thing I am trying to achieve. It certainly doesn't happen on each occasion -- only when breath and stroke align, when the muscles of the client are relaxed, their skin is soft enough not to distract me and the ambience is not disrupted by the outside.

It's incredible how rarely you can create that feeling.

But the attachment in sex is enjoyable. Losing control -- the commonality between the two -- is enjoyable. In other ways, losing control can be so painful, so disturbing of life and its enjoyment, but to cease to be is sweet.

When you touch someone, perhaps you are kissing them, if a moment comes when you stop thinking when you are doing, and you are only doing, you can find cessation. You can still the turbulence and feel pure and whole.

Sometimes, but only rarely, when I am dandling Zenita on my knee, and all my thought is directed into her smile, her laugh...

I don't ask myself why I want it to stop. I just want it to stop.

Sometimes, Mrs Zen suggests that I should take drugs. She thinks I have something treatable. Unless they find a cure for the human condition though, drugs will never be anything but a way to bludgeon feeling, and take half what you are with it, and I want to be what I am almost as much as I want feeling to stop.

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:20 pm