We talk until we are hoarse to fill up any scary emptiness. We put people on strange personal pedestals and worship them from afar. We compulsively turn license plates into acronyms. (Well. I do!) We work beyond our needs, crowd out other parts of life. We eat long past when our bodies cry: enough! We collect CDs, dolls, coins, football stats until our shelves and minds are overflowing, until we’re no longer in touch with the live pleasure they brought at the outset. Is the sixth drink as good as the first?

Obsessive thoughts. Compulsive acts. Not about joy. Though initially the thoughts and behaviors may be very sweet or worthwhile. At some point, they lose their sweetness and only serve as brief distractions from fear or pain before anxiety builds up again.

I have so been there. I still look into my own rear view mirror, to see the very real problems that have been invisible to me for so long. As we consciously address the problems, the obsessive stuff no longer serves a distracting purpose. It crumbles away.

Yesterday afternoon, as I drove in the traffic behind car after car after car, all I could see in the rear-view mirrors ahead were sunbursts of light. Light incompatible with fear.

As Rumi describes in ‘The Pickaxe’, after the digging, the breaking of the foundation, there are two veins of carnelian.
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ah. Very funny. I just took out the trash. At the base of the dumpster, half in the dust, something glinting in the sun. I bent down. A small sphere of transparent red glass. A marble! I took it in, washed it, set it on a sunny sill, and took its picture. It wasn’t until I sat back down to post this that it came to me: carnelian!