56. A Vessel For A Feeling

There’s a feeling inside you that needs to be let out. You’ve felt it for ages and you’ve finally decided you have to release it into the world. You need to express it. Sure, you could tell someone about it, but that wouldn’t be enough. The feeling is too powerful. It needs to live apart from you. It needs to be given its own separate existence.

You need to create a container, a vessel, to carry your feeling in your stead. You need to make something, but you aren’t sure what. You start thinking and investigating. You come up with an impressive list of ideas, techniques, and methods. This process of imagining and discovering feels good while you’re doing it, but your feeling is still with you. You have not yet created anything. All you’ve done so far is think.

Now is the time to do. You apply your methods, techniques, and other products of thought to create the perfect vessel — but nothing happens. What you produce is dead on arrival. It cannot hold your feeling. What must you do differently? You understand the ”what” but not the ”how” — you know what you want to show but not not how to show it. You try a few more times but still you get nowhere. You grow frustrated. Should you just quit? You want to abandon the project, but your feeling persists. It still needs to be released. It demands to be given a life of its own.

Obviously you can’t continue doing what you’ve been doing. So you decide to let go of your ideas, of your methods, of all of your thoughts. You decide not to think at all. You will simply do, and see what you get.

You make the first marks. Gradually, something starts to appear. A being. It’s not at all what you expected. You aren’t sure of its value. You can’t tell whether it’s any good at all. But it is something and it is real. You know this because you can see vague traces of your feeling in it.

You press forward, allowing the vessel to emerge freely from your body. You allow no thought or reflection. You’ve abandoned all of that, or at least reserved such processes for a later time. Now there is only release. Now there is only birth.