I quit dreaming
of success, and dreamed instead
I could lift fulfillment’s burden
off of me.
Yet there remained dreams
I could never truly hope
for, because I thought
they were make-believe.
I wondered --
could I not hope greater?
Higher, further, and beyond?
What had I to lose?
The dream may never come.
Perhaps it can’t.
But the hope itself:
this hope lives as love burns
on in the grieving.
Truly, I can only gain;
and hope is its own treasure.
You cannot claim to value life itself, the sacredness of all that happens without a person’s deliberate action or intervention, while simultaneously judging a person’s worth by the merits of their efforts.
If you need to earn a living, your life has been given no value of its own. If life is what you make of it, you have tossed aside the stunning mystery of being alive in the first place.
You are not a breath-winner. Your body largely runs itself, and your efforts will never eclipse the value of your heart beating for you. Without your body’s autonomic functions, you would have no chance to achieve anything of your own will. Your achievements are secondary.
Perhaps they don’t matter at all.
We inhabit ancient buildings, these bodies. We do not really know how to use them and this alone shows that our bodies are separate from ourselves. Your cells know precisely how to grow teeth and have done it before and seemingly could do it again — but you don’t know how. You couldn’t grow yourself a new tooth on purpose no matter how deeply you understood why your body does what it does.
Our bodies might as well be alien craft that we try (and fail) to make full use of. If ever there was a mind that could take control of the body’s autonomic functions, tweak parameters for optimization in different circumstances, and truly lay claim to having first willed its consciousness into physical form, such a mind would be simultaneously both the creator and the created. This pair, working as intended, feed into one another endlessly to fuel perpetual progress — though it could also be viewed as play.
The brain has a fundamental operating system, something acting as the code for experiencing thoughts. The operating system is not composed of thoughts or consciousness itself, but instead the kinds of pre-thoughts required in order to think and to perceive one’s own thinking. Thus it becomes apparent that the brain is separate from the phenomenon of consciousness. A mind capable of changing its own operating system would be a fully integrated brain and mind, one that is both the programmer and the user all at once. Again, the possibilities of such mastery of one’s grey matter are remarkable. Such a person might cease to feel antagonism from her environment, from other people, or even from gods. Such a person would be complete in herself and able to navigate most concerns by adapting to the needs of the moment.
Such a person might be capable of so-called achievements that we would envy. But I think that if this person spent all their years in pursuit of no particular goal, just play — this would not be a waste of time and potential. To play one’s life with the pleasure of a musician in eternal improvisation is the treasure of life. Meanwhile the individual melodies need not be judged, since they are technically of no value at all.
Your value is not in being a bread-winner, and you are not a breath-winner either. You are a human breathing. This alone is the measure of your value and I find it worthy of having faith in, for it lays to rest one’s struggle for achievements.
You may then rest assured in your greatness, and play with life instead of trying to survive it.
All that exists owes its life to all that is no more. Each passing moment is a martyr for the next, just as pain is our debt to joy. There’s no wisdom or faith that makes pain less painful. It must hurt if anything is to matter: your life depends on it.
So stop. Your sorrow chases you: turn toward it. Watch it catch up. It will not pounce and end you. You will not lose more than you already have.
Grief is your mother. Let her feed you, for grief is the food your soul was made to eat. It digests pain into life itself. Your soul knows how to break pain down into its parts, which are the same nutrients that combine to make purpose and awe and laughter. You don’t have to do anything, just as your stomach knows what to do with meat and potatoes. Turnips have birthed poetry — consciousness — war crimes — human drama. Pain birthed the chance at eking out a living at all.
Stop starving yourself. This hunger strike never prevented the bad things from happening, and your numbness slips into dissolution as you cease to exist.
So greet your sorrow. Make room for it at your table. Accept the dish it offers and break bread for you both.
Grief is here. Grief, your mother who loved you. Eat, weep, and see tomorrow. Nourished, you will survive; one day you will have enough strength to give as thanks.
Your body is a space suit; your mind is the universe; and you are a nomad. No hope of survival lies out of touch from your body’s biological airlock, but your mind is another story. The moment your brain bloomed its first coherent thought, aware, your mind broke free from its mechanisms, escaped a life of vehicular computation, and became you: an opened portal. You are a particle collider but made of thoughts and dreams; you are a deep space telescope that curves imagination into a lens, at will. You are a peculiar force of freedom calculating towards infinity, trying to find a limit as imagination multiplies. Home and world are packed into greymatter sacks, and your mind wanders, literally, through its self-created door: the glittering potential of being you. On your journeys, the less you carry insofar as facts, the better. Nomads make do in every circumstance imagined with few hard truths, improvising solutions anew as if creating its tools from loss and hope, vacuum and pressure. So you are free; you may go wherever your creativity conjures as no mission was ever issued alongside your life. Simply persist and make camp with meaning. Make meals with meaning. Make meaning from hardship, make meaning from triumph. Make meaning in any way you can, lest you grow weary of exploring the wild beauty of all you are, and close that door forever.
I have always been a seeker of beautiful ideas. In grade one, inspired by the thrill of something otherworldly, I approached my teacher at recess to express my concern that there needed to be “more mystery in the classroom”. I remember those words exactly. She was baffled but did not discourage me from creating a mystery of my own for the other kids to experience. I hid under the table of the playhouse kitchen set-up and cut out paper “footprints”. Then, before the students got back to the room, I arranged them in a line that wandered the room. Naturally the kids were very excited and intrigued by this mystery. What did it mean? My teacher almost desperately asked me to produce an answer, some kind of plot or point to it all, but I felt my job was done. I wouldn’t admit to the other children that I had done it, and enjoyed the chatter of speculation buzzing over the next few days.
Over years I explored many faiths and philosophies, but when I sensed my belief was not genuine, that there was some deal-breaker within the ideology that I could not accept, I would move on. Often my greatest point of contention was with the portrayal of a God who possessed infinite knowledge and power, yet sounded like a slightly cranky old man.
Or worse, a dictator.
Or a cult-leader who professed unconditional compassion for all his followers while beating them in the back room for daring to look him in the eye.
It is said in Abrahamic religions that God created humans in his own image. That being so, would he not find it an abomination that a single one should be cast aside or eternally damned, as they are symbols of God himself? Even if these strange small beings all inhabit an uncanny valley when compared to him.
And to convince human minds with threats and force might make people appease him with claims of their belief — but no one can be bullied into genuine love. Only submission.
That said, the mysteries of what powers may lie behind the scenes of the observable universe will always intrigue me. Personally, I think they are best left as mysteries — paper footprints across a grade one classroom.
Her existential crisis, a late-onset failure to thrive, found no crumb of meaning in this hand-to-mouth life. It felt too similar to the assembly line itself. To even think on it, especially when traveling on the streetcar, or in bed at night, or at the grocery store -- that was abomination, admitting to herself that she was but waiting to die. With a practiced breath she steadied her thoughts. In her mind’s eye, she pressed dawn’s dew from a clump of moss and let it drip onto her tongue, parched from singing the stars to sleep. In the outward world, she exhaled slowly, swaying with the streetcar’s pull toward the factory. She smiled, her thoughts stretching like a cat from sleep, refreshed. Wildness had long fled her flesh, her physical life captured in a consumerist orbit around this modern sun-god of eternal hungering. Hers seemed a joyless people, staid and satisfaction-fearing. Such people who would desire to wall up the wind, lest it beguile a curious mind to feel a true and natural power. Such a world inspired only emptiness. She survived because she’d decided her mind was a lawless place. Within, she found a raw landscape, hers alone, where a life could be made idea-foraging, making camp in a moral debate, and seeking the fertile fields of soul. Here her nomadic mind worked out her own domestication, unbound and traveling light, cultivating her existence like an artisan’s craft. Rivers ran for a living, too. Stagnation so quickly turned water to poison. All flow and cycles and seasons felt entropy’s breath at their necks, and never since stopped to see if they were still being chased. The streetcar squealed to her stop. Now she’d cross the street and spend a twelve-hour shift working the line, all the while traversing a rocky steppe of her mindlands, choosing stones that struck her heart as treasure.
Were emptiness real,
would I still drift, dream-drawn
to endless steppes of lichen latched
on lonely rock, fearlessly communing
with an existential sky?
For every place is teeming
with spirals of being,
and where I am without void
I find the rite of dancing,
enjoined ecstatically
in the passion of being amongst it all.
Here, sadness has no home,
as I oust my denial of coiling mystery,
and thus crown to glory the Stirrer
of all sightless cycles of existence
everywhere.
She told me that stones lived, crept, and even flew, just slower than our imagined rate of time. Years later I understood how to love a river rock like a bird, for time pulled hard upon my beloved, until we were distant in the same room. Her breath became one unending syllable of a phrase I’d never hear completed. “Ahhhhhhh,” she breathed, and if time ran fast enough for stones to fly, she would say, “I love you.” I had faith enough to love her and this life she now lived, a love undeserving of pity from those who never knew the secret life of stones. I came to move slower, too. “Ahhhhhhh,” I breathed gently, my shoulder pressed upon hers, too scared to refrain from finishing the phrase, after a while: “I love you.” Then, last night some urban creature dug up the fallow flower bed outside our front window. When I drew aside the drapes in acceptance of another day behind us, I wondered about the torn earth -- would time heal this like a scraped knee? I set the question free, turning away from the living land. The garden had only a minor wound, and the stones of the walkway leading from the door were full of thoughts and dreams as always. My beloved was breathing, “Ahhhhhheeeeeeeeee....” I love you.
Do not look with wonder at the masters of crafts or sciences; admire instead the natural imagination of a child to sees potential in anything. If you can realize the potential of the present moment and truly connect with that feeling, you have recaptured the spirit of a child who so naturally explores their imagination to the fullest, in joy and wonder and laughter.
Once upon a time, a fair was being held in the middle of a deep forest, and folk from across the known world were travelling to gather there. Though they came from all directions, there was but one way in, the Bridge of Gathering, for the fairgrounds were surrounded by a vast moat.
One lass, walking alone from her home in the North, paused by a fallen willow tree to take some refreshment as the day grew hot. She was peering at the tree’s gnarled roots and broken trunk when suddenly she heard a faint voice cry out, “I’m stuck!” The lass leapt to her feet and instinctively began to shove away the debris of branches, in hopes of rescuing the poor soul trapped beneath the willow tree.
Meanwhile, a merchant driving a wagon filled with his best wares approached from a town in the South. He’d been swept up in awe, marveling at the height of the trees, as such great trees did not grow near his village. He too heard the voice cry out. Instantly, he dove into the back of the wagon to find the longest ladder he had, to save the poor soul who had climbed too far into the canopy and couldn’t find their way down.
At the same moment, a studious lad approached from a school in the West, his face nearly masked by the book he held up to his weak eyes. When he heard the faint voice cry out, he dropped the book and squinted, but he could only see as far as the pond that ran beside his path. His heart pounding, he stripped off his shirt to use as a makeshift rope, hoping it was long enough to reach the poor soul who was drowning.
Near the scene, there was also an old woman hobbling forward with stubborn determination. She had come alone from her hut far in the East, where she was known for her wisdom in healing ailments and infirmities of the body. She too heard the voice, and paused to look around, uncertain of where the voice had come from.
Then she called out, quite sternly, “Speak up, ye! I can’t be of service if I don’t know what the trouble is.”
And a strained voice replied, “Some lard will do, please and thank you! I got meself caught in this old fence, see! Just past the tree line, here! Look for me red hat as I’m a-waving it right at you! ‘Twas supposed to be a shortcut but I’ve been here an hour now, with me foot stuck between these logs. I reckon a bit of grease will do the trick!”
So the old woman reached into the pouch on her belt and took from it a small ration of butter wrapped in paper. She could see the man waving his hat, deep in the thick of brambles and ancient ruins some distance off her path. Grumbling at her sore old bones, she picked up her skirts and made her way over to the man, who could only wave his hat with greater zeal as he waited for her.
“Now then, ye better have learned something from this,” the old woman said, but not without a hint of a smile as she crouched by his trapped foot.
“Aye, that I did,” he replied. “There are three other folk I can see in these woods, but they paid me no mind. Full of themselves, they are! Not another decent soul round here, other than you!”
The old woman glanced at the other travelers and shook her head. “Oh, their souls aren’t the trouble. They’re trying to help you as we speak.”
“The hell they are, pardon me!” the man exclaimed, pointing at the merchant halfway up a tree, the lass covered in dirt and leaves, and the student preparing to jump into a pond.
The old woman gave the man’s buttered boot a tug, and out it came, so fast the man nearly toppled over.
“Their trouble is, they think they know what your trouble is,” the old woman said.
“Troubling trouble, that is,” the man murmured in amazement.
“Indeed, I’ve found no cure for that,” she said gravely. “Now, be at my service — a man like ye can help an elder on her journey. Take my arm, but mind, I don’t walk fast.”
“I’ll bring you cross the Bridge of Gathering like me own sweetheart,” the man promised.
And so they walked, soon trading tales and jokes that betrayed gentle affection, without a word to anyone else travelling the forest.
Where Spirit Stops 