It is easy to forget that the world changes if you stay in the same place, living the same routines like a meat robot. In travel the world changes, if only because you see a different part of it. The places you go have changed since you were last there and home has changed when you get back. A change of perspective, movement on a moving sphere.
The eye, the soft machine that lets light in, is the key to growth. Show it new things so the sleeper can awaken and see old things with new eyes. A fixed point amidst the maelstrom, come to rest in your motion. Globes rotating around each other, giving light, hosting life and living sight.
I dream of a space of freedom with nomad royalty drifting the landscape pursuing fragments of paradise
I desire dark elves and androgynous gods free in their bondage submitting only to desire rubbing sliding together in ecstasy
I see the visions of green waters golden lights laughing faces singing voices together in the abundant now
I feel the world blowing past on wheels and sails and wings we move absorbed in the dance of our holiness
I come into this world my righteous inheritance the blood in my veins crackles and joy burns away the mundane
That salmon pink of the living autumn
leaves me breathless in the teasing drizzle
lost in profundities of cloud and sky,
revelatory
in how they hide the distance from me
shaping a space bound by seagull cries
and the gentle rhythm of the waves.
I find my joy hidden in my sadness. By digging into the parts of my soul that cry out in pain, I see what I truly desire to be and all the myriad ways I betray myself every day. I find the great reservoir of love I keep hidden behind fear. I find the human being I’m meant to be, have been (briefly, all too briefly) and will be again.
From that dark soil the bright blossom slowly opens outward, fed by and embodying the light of the sun, coloring the world with that eternal mystery… that beauty, with all its wasteful glory, is possible at all in this harsh dark universe we share and fight over.
Our culture teaches us to see with eyes held to the tightest of focuses and hear the world chopped up into tiny things like words and syllables. With these tiny slices of reality we try to grasp the world but we end up touching only a minuscule bit of it.
Waiting for us just outside these limiting fixations is such a wealth of knowledge, wisdom and beauty that we can scarcely imagine it. But we can unlearn these cultural fixations. We can relax our eyes and let in more of the light. We can cease to hear the words and start to hear the song. We can perceive how all of nature dances, singing a sublime complexity in harmony with the fundamental pulsations of life.
And as we learn how to experience this dance of life, we can feel our body resonate with these primal pulsations of our true nature. We can begin to relax the restraining armour, which we had constructed of our fear and our frustrations.
We realize that we can participate with this vision, we can hear this tune and remember… we are dancing too.
The winds of change blow west along the wall by the waves towards the gracefully descending sun and, for the moment, we walk against that wind. We discuss our dreams, our desires, our visions for the future but we know that we can’t predict where that winding path leads, not in the face of the winds of change.
When they blow and fill the sails of the ship of destiny, the path we know is lost and a new direction is embarked upon. We must wait until the winds have settled before we can again read the stars to figure out where we are going and see what new lands that wind has directed us to.
And in excitement, tempered a little with humbleness, we turn towards that descending sun, the winds of change now at our backs, driving us on as we walk the path along the sea… towards the ever distant horizon.
For a while my life was a series of increasingly more profound revelations. It was as if I was peeling back more and more of the skin of maya and perceiving the mechanisms behind reality. It seemed like I was a great player, attuning with destiny, but when the buzz of novelty wore off and I saw my existence with more mundane eyes, what exactly had changed? What was the benefit of my discoveries, for me or for others?
The discovery was that knowledge does not equal power, as it is famously supposed. Power requires a compromise from pure awareness, to act in the face of incomplete knowledge. To put your energy in that area which you have precisely the least ability to see, the territory hidden in the fog of your warring desires.
And so my world lost its magic. I became mired in the day to day business of survival. The maneuvering of the rational gambler, trying to maximize my returns in the face of uncertainty.
So here I am again, lost in the doldrums. Drifting in the mist. Spending the last of my vision to describe the impasse and I find myself again, as always, at the crossroads… bargaining with the unwritten signposts.
