No place (feels like) home

"...I looked inward and the beauty of my own emptiness filled me till dawn. It enveloped me like a mine of rubies..." ~Rumi

I've been facing my own worst enemy in these last few hours. And she's me. She follows me around and guesses every thought before it crosses from one side of my brain to the other. I've tried to tie her hands behind her back, but as of yet I have only two hands and when I tie hers, I tie mine as well.

And that's no way to live.

In this Purgatorial island with inmates whose sentences vary from brief vacation-like brushes with spirituality to those who have committed larger crimes, I've met those I needed to meet without realizing it. That's how it happens in the movies, too. The main character meets only and exactly who she needs to at every step on the yellow brick road. Dorothy's road was rather dull (even with munchkins) because she was from Kansas and Oz was dreamed up earlier in this age of spiritual desperation and darkness.

My conspirators are adulterers and addicts, both orthodox and reformed. And they have the tools and skills I need to unlock the intricate stitches that keep me sewn to my demons. All I have to do is ask for help and my shadow can be released to jump back to the real world of Wendy Moira Angela Darling and her brothers while I learn to fly again here in Neverland.

But asking for help is the last thing I want to do.

What I have realized, again, what I have known always and yet forget on a daily basis, is that I cannot outrun my own demons. 

Neither, I'm afraid, can you.

Despite my deepest wish that I could run away from her on my own, or slowly digest her wickedness, I keep hitting the unfortunate snag that no addict has ever, ever, ever liberated herself. Have you ever heard of one? I know those who live in mountain caves in total isolation, but I'm not a cave-dweller. Which leaves me with very few options.

(I'm pretty sure I can't rely on a single-family home caught up in a twister or a crocodile to wander in, either).

My instinct is to run into the sea. To head for the beach and wait for some revelation to wash in on the tide, but beach privileges are restricted to daylight hours, so no sandy midnight ruminations for me. Nothing but excessive, exorbitantly priced chocolate and your sympathetic eyes to fuel my self-discovery. 

According to the sacred doctrine of the Warden, if I think only pure thoughts, deny myself chocolate and coffee, eggs and garlic, and anything with spice or fermentation, and certainly drugs and alcohol and sex and talking and the internet, that then I will find this inner peace and quiet. Then I will realize that my demons and I are in fact just projections on the movie screen of my silly mind.

(It reeks of cave dwelling to me.)

So instead I turn to the wisdom of those whose crimes most resemble mine. Those recidivists who have been in my ruby slippers, both as the witch and the drug-addled virgin from Kansas.  

(you get that it was the witch's shoes that Dorothy wore home, right?) 

This is what I'm like sans caffeine, with fewer than six hours of sleep a night and gigantic white pants. Trying to make sense of the hodge podge of lessons and stories. 

Trying to make shoes out of emptiness.

Clicking my heels to no avail.