Isaac,
you’ve always been wicked supportive of the borderline embarrassing shit I work on. I remember posting GarageBand music I’d make, and you’d always be encouraging. You’re a good guy for real brotha, and I appreciate it!
It’s all in good fun for me. That’s why I love the creative stuff. Not because I think it’s better than anything else out there, or because doing it makes me appear a certain way. I let go of those expectations somewhere along the line. But as I grow older, I find myself feeling almost panicked, looking all around for something Real. Something that lasts, because I know that nothing does! Whatever exists Right Now, in the eternal present, is all there is. And to remove oneself from the Now, to adorn a mask that represents nothing Real at all just to make others smile… some people have figured that lifestyle out, and I’m sure it works somehow. But it’s hard to ignore what happens afterwards. When you go to sleep alone and wake up feeling like what you are has always been unseen. Like no matter how connected you feel, the human experience demands a certain Understanding of this Loneliness. The games you played for so long no longer reap the same rewards, and you’re left beside yourself at the end of it all, wondering who it is that could ever truly be rewarded in the flesh of their lived experience.
It only feels lonely, though. I did not emerge from Nothing. Nature is called into being, and our energies are contrived by the name of a Godly, otherworldly convention. I’m convinced that God is Dreaming it all. That I’m only somewhere within a great Unfolding, waiting for a Return into static rest. Life can be so short lived, and it bothers me: in 300 years, what remains? And where is it anyways, the place I know I could find, where the Beginning should go? What does it even mean to begin when nothing ends? Nothing but our lives and the fleeting Memory of Man. Reality is a shadowed projection of itself, and the secret is shared at the core of all things, physical and ephemeral alike.
Should I rest in the respite of my undoing? Or do we, as Man, find ourselves in a terrible predicament, where everything we think we know is but a shadow cast onto stone walls, flickering from a light that shines high above us, outside of our lowly caves? Outside of our flesh and bones? Is that what Spirit is? Is it a place I can somehow learn to find? And the Home of all Spirit, where the real beginning first unfolds, does it round about and find its end there too? Is life full circle? Or is it something angular, obsolete, eternally folded up and against itself, in damnation of the effort spent maintaining a liminal experience?
There are no answers, because God has no Questions. Stillness is the only action required for us to begin. I’ve found that what we think to hold isn’t finite at all. Maybe all that’s there for us to find had always been, still as could be, waiting for us to carry it away with our translucent hands that hold no things, no matter their weight. We pass through things, and the time that takes can consume us, until eventually it’s easier to be devoured by it than to be compressed and transposed further down into the tides of tomorrow.
Life is not long at all. There’s no need for our performances. It is only in our foolish nature that man should seek the Gifts and not the Giver. What is there to be found that has not been given? And why should I need more of its briefness to hold onto for myself? No matter the shape of it, as it pulls me in, I don’t feel like I belong to myself, to the person who’s led me into that state where I wish to receive. What I should seek instead is a patterned Stillness, one that can be replicated in times of crisis. Like the swelling of a Timeless Wave. And it is in those swelling tides, those salt waters, where I shed my skin and learn to become the water.
CAMIGULA