Close your eyes

Beginning an adventure to a quiet place

The Signs

If I keep going this way, I’m going to lose myself.

The symptoms run from morning to late at night. I peel my lids open to watch a comedy sketch I’ve already seen five times when there isn’t a thing in the world I want more than sleep. Piles of unread books take root and grow back into trees on my tables and shelves. I stop writing for months at a time.

Now that I’ve listed the markers, it sounds more like a spell or a curse than an illness.

I can’t stop looking. At my phone. My laptop. My TV. No time for leisure and no time for work. Only for viewing.

That’s both a natural and an unnatural state for me. Unnatural, in that I’d rather be reading, thinking, walking, writing, or sleeping. Natural, in that I’ve become infected with a need to watch that overpowers even my own health.

The part of me that longs to read and write is banished and bolted in a cobwebbed corner of my mind. But, the lock isn’t very good. On her last escape, before I could shove her back into her cell, she managed to take stock of me: of the doomscrolling, the blue-light-sore eyes, the stagnation.

My attention span is shortening, focus is here, there, and everywhere, and at the bottom I feel myself rotting and all my creative energy threatening to break out and crack me in half.

We’ve been here before

None of this surprises me. Stories—ancient and new—of gorgons, palantiri, magic mirrors, cities marked for destruction, and gazing too long at your own reflection warn of the dangers of beholding the wrong object, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, and for too long.

But I don’t know how to stop, and when I put my willpower to the task, I fail. Over and over. For me, it’s not a puzzle that comes naturally to a solution, so I search my memory for those who’ve mastered the countercurse.

Paul Simon’s now meme-famous line hello darkness my old friend and St. John of the Cross’s poem on the ‘dark night of the soul’ spring up like daffodils through the concrete (I love those hearty little flowers).

Without context, these both sound dreary. So much so that popular culture uses them to describe depression and spiritual abandonment. It helps when you know that Paul Simon frequently slipped into his apartment bathroom, guitar in hand, and shut off all the lights so he could make music without distraction. And the Dark Night of the Soul was a night of reflection and focus, when the saint closed his eyes to the distractions of the world in order that he might become one with God.

In Heaven or Closed Eyes by Odilon Redon, painted in 1889

The Quest

So, there’s the answer to the question how do I stop looking: I learn to close my eyes and sit with the friendly darkness.

Easy to say. Hard to do.

And now there’s a whole new slew of questions: What does it mean to ‘close my eyes’? Who wants them open and why? What do I lose by so-called sight? What do I gain when the distractions are gone and I’m left alone with my eyes shut?

Here I begin.

How do I sit with the friendly darkness? And how do I learn to close my eyes?

The call to adventurers

Journeys of this sort are better accompanied. Better with friends. And anyone who wants to grow quiet in themselves, who longs to enter that frightening, fantastical place of becoming and potential—where God works miracles, and where magic, truth, beauty, spirit, mind, and goodness run freely and water the roots of all creative aims—that person will find themselves at home here.

I have a great deal to learn about that road myself. I’m far from expert. And for me, there’s no better way of learning any subject than committing to write about it. I’d like to write about what I find, to tell you the story of my journey, rather than instruct in my usual style.

Because I can’t get past the feeling that breaking a curse has to start with humility, and even a square inch of good ground can be a beginning.