While I was helping my mother unpack into her apartment in November, we came across some pieces of lava, probably souvenirs from a vacation trip abroad. My mother didn’t want to keep them.
I was thinking about them this morning. I was thinking about a spiritual practice Gita was encouraging me in some time ago, to connect deep within in the direction of the earth. I think it’s harder to conceptualize infinity in that direction, but, analogous to the idea of physics on a level of particles and strings and such, I think it’s possible. This is in contrast with prayer connecting me upwards and outwards to the cosmos.
When I connect inwards and in the direction of the earth and its molten core, I tend towards conceptualizing in imagery of soothing reddish-brown substances welling up within me. When I pray up and out, I usually end up with light or water images.
Anyway, it occurred to me this morning that lava can be so porous and yet it is a rock of sorts. Can I use this combination to help me feel well-dressed to deal with other people? I am protected by something hard and yet it is a porous substance allowing for exchange of some sorts of things.
I don’t know, but I find a theme of my life is looking for a way to interact, as myself, with others and without becoming too damaged by the interaction. I don’t see sealing myself off, I prefer not to withdraw from interaction, but I am as porous as the day is long and I don’t think I am supposed to change that or to incur crippling damage either. So I am always open to figuring out a way to feel protected and porous at the same time. And while I can “turn over” to the universe particular difficult situations and interactions, and I do, I feel that I need to improve my overall posture so that I have a more continuous, baseline sense of well-being.
One practice is to let incoming assaults pass through me instead of engaging with them. I can feel them become diluted and dissipate through my connection upwards and outwards, as clean energy mixes with such incursions. But that does not speak to my sense of being a sitting duck sometimes for material from others I don’t want to deal with, especially stuff they should be addressing to forces greater than ourselves, not to other human beings. In this category lies huge anxiety and distress and a sense that everything is terrible — I have people who try to interact with me who have more of those than I can process comfortably, and my posture is that they should stop trying to get me to process it on their behalf. But they continue, I suspect because we have an instinct to survive that does not always get channeled in constructive ways. And so I look for what I can do at my end to maintain my equanimity while they do, because it takes a lot of time and energy of my own to clean myself up after being slimed by such incursions.
I think lava may be a helpful concept for me to do that. I think it can help me feel strong and soothed and protected and porous. Hardened it is brittle, molten it is suffocating (I think), but like light being both wave and particle in some way (again, my caution that I may be misunderstanding the science), I think it is possible in some way to think of lava as both protective and porous, flexible and brittle. If lava can participate in all of these characteristics over time, then I am hopeful that on a spiritual plane, without the constraint of time, I can participate in those characteristics simultaneously. Surely one of our human difficulties is holding paradoxical ideas in our limited heads — doesn’t mean that such paradoxes cannot be understood in other ways.