Our Black Holes of Despair

We are all born starving for air, hungry and hurt and looking for the nipple. That is the truth. And we breathe that first breath and take that first sip and set in motion a chain of events that never ends until we've breathed and sipped our last.

I've been thinking about this hunger lately and how it relates to that vast sense of emptiness that can open up inside us sometimes. I believe it's that sense of emptiness that drives us to do most of what we do on this earth, in this life. It is for me, anyway.

Some days the emptiness is just a small tickle and one that I can easily manage with a yogurt, say, or a nice walk and a good laugh with a friend.

Some days, though, there seems to be a black hole of darkness inside of me so huge that I can easily imagine falling inside of that which is inside of me, which of course can only be done metaphorically unless perhaps there is a real explanation in string theory, which I don't begin to understand but which seems to explain a lot of weird and magical stuff.

I know I'm not the only one who feels this way. It would be interesting if we all had a meter we wore on our chests that indicated how big the hole within us was at that particular moment. Sort of like a mood ring, only for existential despair. I think we'd be surprised to see just how empty a lot of people whom we may think of as normal and relatively well-adjusted really feel.

There's an awful lot of emptiness-filling attempts going on all around us all the time. We eat too much, we drink, we do drugs, we have sex, we look to God, we buy things, we paint and sculpt and write and get married and have babies and do all sorts of things we believe will fullfill us and all of that works for a little while and sometimes for a long time, but I don't think anything really works all the time. And don't tell me God does, either. If Mother Theresa could feel an emptiness where her God should have been for a great many years of her life, then damn! I know it won't work for me.

All I know is that if I hang on during the hard, crazy-feeling times, the emptiness seems to get less and there is more light and less darkness in my heart. That's one lesson I've learned from aging- that although when this melancholy is upon me I feel that it always has been and always will be, it hasn't and it won't.

I'll wake up one morning (and probably soon) and for no apparent reason, I'll feel okay about things. Maybe not ecstatic, but certainly okay.

And until then, I just have to accept the fact that I will not fall into anything unless I let myself. I remember a thing that Stephen Gaskin, the Big Daddy of the Farm Commune said once, which is that insanity was just his back yard and he'd wandered around there a few times but mostly he chose not to.

I always liked that. I feel like I've sat on my porch many a time and looked out at what might be a really scary place but I've always known that exploring that particular part of my yard isn't something I need to do.

Not yet, anyway. And I doubt I will because as vast and deep as my own personal emptiness feels sometimes, I know it's nothing but a thimble-full compared to some people's who can't help but jump into that back yard of their Jungle of Despair. I'll never get a gun and mow down people at a mall and I'll never take too many pills and hope for death, either.

It ain't that bad.

I'll just struggle along like most of us do and I'll probably never figure it out, but I do take comfort in the fact that there are great mysteries of life and that's all there is to it.
That's sort of slim comfort, but it'll do for now. It'll do.

And again, I've used a painting by Karen Davidson here and it's called Distressed Woman and I love it. I know just how that woman feels and isn't that what art is all about? Looking at something that someone else did and recognizing our own selves in it?
I think so.
Karen- you're an artist. Send me more pictures, please.