But I fear I am beginning to enjoy the unraveling too much.
Like one of those wayfarers who hop trains and always with the dog and the dreadlocks, the one who decides to leave before knowing there was an alternative option to stay, the realization hitting them like the train in which they are barreling west through the Bonneville Salt Flats and at this point why not just aim for the Pacific?
In the Advent of 2016, I woke up.
I woke up to my life.
I woke up to the life of everyone around me.
I woke up to big Life, itself.
Ambition dissolved into one million pieces of a puzzle that floated above my head for a brief moment before crumbling stardust to my feet in perfect, divine architecture: your face, my future, the undoing all wrapped up in the snout of the beast. I will never forget the first time I saw its face, felt its hot breath on my eyelids.
The waking would not wait for the year to close quietly.
I haven’t been able to think for 4 days.
In fact, I haven’t even been able to digest my food.
Or sleep.
Or think one full thought all the way through to its punctuation Or pick the reins of my mind up and steer it away from the open arms of the ditch, the cliff, the chasm that I knew, since one year ago, was floating right in front of me and that I knew, as of today, I must see to the bottom. I know it is there because even while I lean back lovingly into the hot stench at my back, I can feel the weight of cool air wafting from its gaping mouth and calling me home.
Only the True Self thirsts for that deep, cool, dark place of falling and goes willingly.
This thick brain smog keeps me just one step behind my next. Which sounds funny and obvious to me now, because of course that is exactly how one walks. But it all feels a bit like wading through the honey in your cool, morning cupboard or chasing anything everything in a dREaM. Delightfully futile, despairingly fundamental.
I suppose I am witnessing the Great Scattering of the illusionary cloud that is my addiction, that is control.
The cloud that has been rocking on its haunches over my roof since I was a child. That dimmed the light and muted the sounds and kept my bedroom as a cave so that I might go right on sleeping. Though at times, in my life, a soft breeze has kneaded a thin fissure in that cloud and slipped one or two or three fingers of silvery moonlight through, to fall across my cheek. That cool hand again.
But only a hurricane can wake up a person dead asleep.
The tricky thing is I would have never admitted to it.
I was as awake as I could be, considering my life, it wasn’t my fault I was sleeping through the world.
I was smart, I was talented, I had a cool tech job, graduated college in 4 years, befriended my siblings and my parents were still married. You cannot divorce the art or the artist from the times. And culturally, historically, counterintuitively I was silenced, told to sit down because it was not my turn and to speak now could be wildly unfashionable. And more than anything, you should avoid at all costs the thing that might offend.
But the Spirit does not need words to name things and certainly would not wait on my tongue to form them.
So from my small and clinging position on the hearth of my father’s home the Spirit carried me forward. forward. forward. toward the chasm. Three thousand head of ancient buffalo barreling toward that emptiness. The one I sensed a year ago and even while promising myself I would never allow my toes part from the security of that solid rock face, took a swan dive into that space strung up between who I am and I AM and began the free fall
upward, to my surface
where the Light was waiting to welcome me again, wide awake.