Life; a vacation without postcards.

Life, how can you be

So minute, yet so vast?

So publicly, yet so privately known?

So explorable, yet impossible to describe?

So plausible, yet so unlikely?

So obedient to probability, yet utterly improbable?

So random, yet so meaningful?

So giving, yet so undemanding?

So beyond words, yet so irresistible to words?

I’ll never succeed in describing you

Free from the belief that I must.

Father

I have fears

Such terrible fears

Origins so remote

Wellspring so pure

Uncorrupted, terminal

Bleached white

Fear

–

Father, Father

Let me follow you

Out of this nightmare

And on your chest

Forever safe

I’ll be

How can I express myself without this sickly aftertaste of arrogance in what I say?

How can I even think clearly when I only have another’s language to use, one built layer upon layer of misunderstanding and mistrust?

How can you and I ever really speak and share if we don’t first throw away this pretend set of understood ideas?

For the two of us to meet, really meet and speak, really speak and love even….surely for this, we need to build our own little language, just you and me, so that we can really stay with each other, not leave and come back with foreign formula.

Would that be alright…could we start again please, even if it’s only for my benefit? Can this, right here, be our start?

Let me be the first to say, I don’t know what is going on here.  I don’t know where to begin in what I believe and know.  I feel overwhelmed with so many concepts about life, so many blurred definitions, overlapping meanings, contradictions.

So can we start afresh please?  Or can we just wait a while right here, and not go anywhere….will you stay here with me and keep me company?

I’m just a beginner and while you all seem to be building such complex things, I can’t seem to get even one block to sit on top of another…I’m hopeless at this! I don’t know where to go, which thoughts to follow, which people to believe?

I look at my face in the mirror, my skin, into my eyes, then down the length of my arms…the blemishes on them, the creases, the blue veins….I feel their weight and solidity on the window ledge as I look out into the garden…I look at the shrubs in next door’s garden for a while…and then back at the mirror.

I mean, this is what it’s like for me, just this body here looking at stuff around the place.  Am I missing something?  Seems so basic but I can’t make any of my buildings stand up.

Look how nimble, how quick!

Darting here darting there

Finding patterns

Linking moments

Uncovering treasures

Playing across senses

Leaping across years

Undaunted by change

Diving deep then soaring

Over the open waters

Sparking associations

Sun-filled droplets

Bouncing off smooth stone

In contrast to the conventional,

He was born aged 37 and a half

Fully clothed on a large mattress

Parents nowhere to be seen.

He blinked in the half-dark

A crack of light slicing the curtains

And looked up at the ceiling

He knew he loved ceilings…

On his left arm he could feel

The warm head of a small boy

No name, only breathing.

Outside he heard seagulls

He knew he loved seagulls…..

Their calls filled his head

Before he passed away

A few moments later.

Truly, life means you no harm

Whatever you have been cruelly taught

Please be at ease now

There is no ill will, no doomsday, no malevolence

There is no consequence to this life that you need fear

No wrong turning that you can unwittingly take

There is no urgency to this moment nor hidden test

Nothing within experience to which you must pay attention

There is no measure for your experience, nor measurer

There is no beginning you need remember nor ending to be prepared

Nor even present to which you must constantly attend

There is no time for you to save or waste

Nor final death for you to overcome

And from now on, let’s live without the shadow of death.  Even if it be on faith alone, I say there is no death.  I see only life and believe in only life.  For all the evidence I have convinces me that there is only life without an opposite.  And if life is just an idea, then let it dissolve but this, whatever this is, is singular without another….an arrow in endless flight, a constant note, an army without foe. And I don’t give a damn if I’m wrong about this.  I don’t deny my mortality; that I will someday die. But what I deny is that there is anything beyond or opposed to life and I deny that there is anything other than life.  I refuse to let my life be spoilt by this greatest of fears; that there is something other than this.  I refuse to be hurried and muddled by this lurking nightmarish fantasy.  Of course I see change, I see my own aging, I see dying.  But I don’t see death. I say it is an impossibility.

The most beautiful discussion there is, is the one that is always waiting to happen but never can….the discussion between you and yourself.

After all the miracles upon miracles in succession, obediently, relentlessly bringing us to this moment, after all the unlikeliness and all the herculean struggle…

To entertain that now, we can exercise our vote on how this moment presents itself and the somersaults it must perform to be worthy, seems miraculously arrogant, monumentally tragic.

There is only total equality between moments; each serves as a vital stepping stone, indispensable carriage, from here to here, nowhere to nowhere,

Each moment glistening with its own “never-to-be-seen-again-ness”, unending labyrinth of overlooked detail, a private dance for you, its audience of one.

To believe in choice is to believe in a world of avoidability, responsibility and regret but to see the mirage of optionality for what it is, is to open the floodgates of compassion, availability and lightening response.