GETTING RID OF PERSONAL PRONOUNS

Words like “I”, “me”, “yours”, and “mine” are major burdens that bring me down, and I would like to let them slide off and disappear forever. They don’t do much that’s helpful, except help me maintain my make-believe notion that life is made up of separate physical entities that can possess and be possessed, keep and be kept. Using the word “I” works against me, for it makes me think of the world as something “out there”, a collection of things that I can catch and control, or be caught and controlled by. It tells me I can keep whatever I can catch, be it money or material things or love or a good life. “I” and “me” and “mine” make me separate and distant and deserted, a lone life forging ahead in a separate, ill-disposed world. These words work against the simple truth that nothing is separate from anything else, and therefore nothing can be measured, set apart, and “owned”. A force like love is not “mine” to be gotten or given, because there’s no separate “me” to get or give it. There’s simply an endless force of caring and friendship, like the winds that work their way among our houses, and neither friendship nor winds can be owned or controlled. Even my life is not “mine”, but is made and owned by the universe -- by the brand-new blood that brings life to my cells, by the oxygen from distant shores that restores my lungs second my second, by the sights and sounds that surround me and construct the life I thoughtlessly call “mine”. It’s no more mine than the winds and oceans are mine, or the faraway stars that swirl in a wilderness as wonderful and vast as the thoughts that somehow set down these words.