No Mind

If you’re anything like me, you’ve experienced the days of endless manic thinking. Ideas, stories, worries, creative aha!s, wondering about so-and-so and getting ourselves all up in someone else’s business. 

“Sometimes I exhaust myself,” penned the fantastical artist and creator of Pondering Pool, Susan Mrosek. I love her art, the way it speaks to all the ways we exist strangely in this world. 
During Covid, I was puttering around at home, creating little soft dolls. The little angel in the picture was supposed to have a head, but I just couldn’t decide what that would look like. Eventually I just started calling her the Angel of No Mind.  No mind. Just space. 

Years ago I wrote “I am often drawn toward asceticism, an interesting lure, as I am rather a hedonist, loving pleasurable things.  Yet it is primarily the sensations I love, not necessarily possessions, unless they be clothing.Lately I continue to feel the need to unload "stuff" from my life, to unload busyness, unload the extraneous.  As I am so often literal, I notice the unloading tends to take a literal or materialistic bent and I think I need to quit jobs, sell or give away all (or most) of my material goods and learn to walk around the island.  I can tend to be quite dramatic about these "callings. 
What does it truly mean for me?  Is it quitting my job, living in a trailer, or under a bridge, or in the forest in a tent?  Is it having nothing extraneous that I own, just one pot, one bowl and spoon and hopefully a lighter?  What, what, WHAT does it mean for me to free myself of the extras?  It occurred to me as I pondered, that it is the kingdom of my mind that is so often cluttered with unnecessary baggage.  It is in the rooms of my psyche where thoughts are thrown higgledy piggledy across the room that I should give my attention, for I could rid myself of all "things" and still have an excess of possessions in my heart.
Oh to have an ascetic mind, where the hallways of my inner world are swept clean of the litter of years; old memories, and habits, old flagellations and reasonings.  How lovely to throw open the windows to the light clean air of a fresh spring morning!  And I have begun!  I have thrown out proverbial garbage bags full, raked up leaves, burned piles of rotting debris, and still there are dust bunnies, cobwebs and old furniture.  The room is clearing though.  The ceiling is higher and the light is pouring in.  Some days it is still dark, the skylights sooty with old fires, but most days the sunlight of peace is shining strong across the floor.
I would be a collector of only fine thoughts and empty rooms.  Rooms so empty there is just that more space that can be filled with the sweet presence of laughter; the Divine who sings in me, and all the lovely, necessary things one can fill a freshly cleaned room with.”