Sanity
Wooden Shrines are sane
Sanity is quiet. Sanity is still. Sanity can whirl and scream, and none of it touches that quiet stillness. The soil relaxes, like vertebrae decompressing.
Sanity can be colorful, but never lurid or garish.
Sanity is quite fine.
Flowers are sane. Oranges are sane. Trees are some of the sanest things that exist outside of the ocean.
Lentils are sane. Sea foam is sane. The east-facing blaze of leaves on a spring morning is sane. Stormclouds are sane.
I don’t know where sanity comes from, but I know that when I say the words rightness or naturalness — the stillness that fills my chest is made of the same stuff as sanity.
Some books are sane, but only a few. Not, I might say, the ones you’d expect.
I have never met a sane person. Only sane moments.
Dandelions are sane. Lions destroy insanity — often creating it in order to destroy it.
Jaguars are a subtle sanity all their own.
I don’t have to list the things that are not sane. You know them. The derangement is everywhere, it is breathed and seen and mostly ignored. You eat the derangement and you watch the garish derangements flash by on your handheld derangement. We can leave these aside, please, just for now, just for once.
There’s a woman I love, and there are many parts of the situation that are not sane. I love some of those too. But in the moments when it’s just her heart feeling my heart — and my face seeing her face feeling my heart feeling her heart — that is made of the same stuff as sanity.
That zero field where reality can relax. Where efforting drops to zero. Where inflation and deflation are released, and the water level moves naturally to its resting place.
Exhale. Exhale. Do it again, as many times as you can, inhaling when it’s right. But this isn’t about the inhale. Exhale. Exhale. Let go. Are you sane now?
Feel your Life, while we’re here. Is it the life you want to be living? Does it move how it wants to move, go where it wants to go?
Is your Life sane?
Feel how you wake up each morning, what your first actions are. Feel what you eat for lunch, what you think about in the silent moments. Feel how you react to quiet. Feel the way you pay attention (or don’t) to people’s faces, their posture, their tone of voice.
Close your eyes and say to yourself: rightness. naturalness. sanity.
Let your Life respond to the words. Are they smooth? Are they painful? Do they shine a light on insanities, both petty and substantial?
Exhale, exhale, exhale again. Say to yourself: I am here. God is here. The Tao is here. I am seen, I am known, I am met.
Is your Life sane?
Warm water is sane. Moving water is sane. Still water is sane. Deep water is sane.
Sometimes, before falling asleep, you half-dream of colors. The colors come from somewhere else, or from a Here much deeper than your usual Here. Those half-dreamed colors are sane.
Medjool dates are insanely delicious — but they are, in fact, sane.
Many (though not most) croissants are sane.
Wooden shrines are sane. I have read many sane haikus. Silk was sane, once. The smell of snow is sane.
Sanity is not timid or over-careful. There is a fullness to sanity, a dynamism within its stillness. Lightning is sane. Running all-out across dirt and grass is sane. Jaguars, I read somewhere, are a subtle sanity all their own.
Wind is sane.
I hesitate to talk about the sanity and insanity of sex, but there is much sane sex to be had. It does not come naturally or automatically, for almost any of us these days, but sane sex truly is possible.
The space six inches behind your spine is sane. The field of space fanning out above your head and shoulders is sane. Purple is sane.
When you become the Will of God, you are a sanity. When you listen to the world-voice, without needing it to say anything particular — you have the opportunity to become sane. When a bird flies between you and the sun, its feathers illuminated and rendered into nature’s own stained glass mosaic — sanity has found you. You might sit with it a moment. You might desire to exhale.
Sun-bleached skulls are sane. The roaring jewels of distant suns are sane.
Is your Life sane?
Eroded cliffs are sane. Ghee is sane. The love I feel for you when I write is sane.
I am not sane, but I am trying.
I am not sane, but I am trying.
I could be sane, so I am trying.
Is my Life sane?
I keep a neutral face when I am shocked by things that I know would be gaudy to be shocked by.
Something in me has, for a long time, not believed that people actually watch short-form video. Every time a friend tells me about a tik tok or a reel or a youtube short that they saw, I hide a flash of surprise. I cannot tell if I am sane or pretentious or just out of touch, or if there’s room for all of them.
Is my Life sane?
Half a year ago, at 3 in the morning, after exhausting hours of processing, a woman sat on a couch across from me, not looking me in the eyes, and told me “The way you live isn’t sane, people can’t live like that. No one can actually live like that. No one can actually live like that.”
Two months after that, another woman told me I was one of the few sane people she knew. I squinted at her, a befuddled question mark. “No no,” she clarified, “I mean The Real Sanity.”
A couple months after that, I called a friend and asked her to check if I was still sane. “The past couple years,” I told her, “they feel like someone should have intervened. What’s been happening to me? How did I end up sleeping under a mosquito net in Gujarat for months? Am I okay??”
“I think,” she said, “there’s something true here that you haven’t quite taken in yet. It’s not the only true thing here. But the distress feels like it’s about something real.”
Is my Life sane? Does my life force maintain its Natural Sanity, or does it move in derangement?
Can I trust my Life? This is maybe the question. Sanity is, I think, trustworthy. If the Life that animates me is sane, then I can trust it, no matter how insane things get or seem.
A phrase I picked up this year: “do it fully, and do it cleanly.”
That’s been a guiding light for me, lately. I’m good at doing things fully, but I stumble on doing them cleanly. I am not a tidy person. I am not detail-oriented. I am prone to inflation and vast sweeps that erase details. Those details matter. Small things matter. I am trying to learn this.
I am trying.
Sane. Sanitary. They share a root. In some way, to be sane is to be clean.
Sane. Sanus. The root means “Healthy, sound, everything in the right place.” In some way, to be sane is to be whole.
Do it fully, do it cleanly. Be whole; be clean.
I am not sane, but I am trying.
I have sanity — it’s just not evenly distributed. Not yet.
Process is sane. Companionship is sane. Ripples are sane.
Attempts are sane.
As usual, past-me seems to have beat me to the punch and had a good grip on whatever it is we’re doing:
I love this writing, River. Sane quiet moments are priceless. Thank you for your ability to express what we know but forget we know it.
One of the sanest things I have read. Thanks.