they were once at peace

at 5 o'clock this morning i was awake.
i will leave it up to you to decide whether it was awake again or awake still.

i sat barefoot and cross-legged in the middle of the living room floor in front of the big picture window with all the lights left off. the only illumination was that of the moon shining on my face, legs, and arms, and in a pool around me made by the open drapes. i sat there in my black dress, staring past the colored glass vases on the floor sill, watching the river rolling and tossing with the breeze. everything was completely quiet and for a moment there was not one distraction in the world as far as i could see or experience.

whatever it is that one claims to be thinking at a time like this, i have come to recognize the distinct absence of anything concrete. the mind drifts and tosses like the water. sort of bleeding from thought pool to thought pool, often with strong undercurrents of connection between them. my undercurrent last night was the idea of misapprehension.

i've been reading this beautiful book by the current dalai lama (one of the best and greatest humans currently residing on this earth, in my humble opinion), exploring the origins and outcomes of negative and positive emotion. it seems that misapprehension (ignorance, misunderstanding, unnecessary exaggeration) is what causes a positive (or neutral) emotion to become negative. to take this a bit further and give a practical example, our misapprehension of another person's motives and thoughts can lead to vastly unpleasant situations and heaps of negative emotion. gross.

i've admittedly misapprehended much in my life. in fact, i am usually pinning my ideas on others of how they are feeling and what they are thinking. and as i sat there on the floor in the darkest of dark, i waited for the water to show me why i do what i do. i don't know what i thought i would see. but not much else in life has caused me more trouble than my inability to see things as they really are.

i think my lama is right when he says that the key to controlling negative emotion is understanding the discrepancies between who we think we are and who we really are. i truly believe that embracing as much reality as we can grasp and constantly remembering our inherent misapprehension of the intricacies of others' hearts and minds can free us from the recurrence of these situations that so often derail us.

what did i see in the water? the moon. and a little bit of bittersweet sadness that life isn't always what we want it to be. things and people pass. money and time run out. our hearts are handed back to us, sometimes a little worse for the wear.

but at the base of all of it, we have a strong and abiding undercurrent.

hope.

new ends. new beginnings. unseen and unforeseen blessings.

maybe i'll see you at 5 o'clock.