Under the surface...

He sometimes misses the intensely intimate relationship he had with the universe. It's not completely gone and he tries his hardest to maintain it, but as he grows older he finds less and less opportunities to speak with himself and despite everything, he still doesn't think of it as his betrayer. He misses the universe who was his friend and he has an idea that one day it might be possible for them to truly reunite. This wild thought has set him wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. Between reason and delusion. 

The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwrapped primal world glided to and from before his passive eyes; wisdom revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, he saw the universe - omnipresent. He saw its foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore they called him mad. So his insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, he comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels compromised, indifferent as the answer to every questions he has ever asked.

I'm the strong one, I'm not nervous...

Living in a haze, staying in the shade...

Another page slowly turns on the calendar, it's almost February now and I continue to spin the silk threads of my story, weaving the fabric of my world. Sometimes it's out of control and it makes me want to swallow the bitter seeds of forgetfulness. Somehow, I always seem to drag myself out of that hole, though. I spin and weave and knit my words and visions until a life starts to take shape. There is no magic cure, no making it all go away forever. There are only small steps upward; an easier day, an unexpected laugh, an obsession that doesn't matter anymore. I am thawing.

A bridge that I can't follow...

As I look back upon my life, it seems to me that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind - taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last - and yet will remain with you for life.

And a part of me will stay there...

Need to know...

Well I've been running as fast as I can,

and you'll never get over what you can't understand.

Forever ain't far, I'm heading home.

Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong,

last time you ever gonna find me gone,

and I'll never let you go again.

I think it's gonna be a long, long time...

Maybe a slow start isn't the worst thing in the world. Usually I would go in head first, guns blazing and be utterly exhausted before I even reach the first milestone. Perhaps I don't have to hurry this time around. What if this year I was completely at ease, and not let the mundane shake me up. Will I get bored? Will I succumb to my lesser instincts? 

He needed to be willing to take risks. He needed to commit himself to going with his first instincts. That first instinct is the product of the subconscious brain, and he had honed his subconscious perception over thousands of practice shots to trust himself. Even if it turns out wrong, the natural growth of his inner life will gradually, over time, lead him to other insights. He must allow verdicts their own quiet untroubled development which like all progress must come from deep within and cannot be forced or accelerated. To let every impression and the germ of every feeling come to completion inside, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, in what is unattainable to one’s own intellect, and to wait with deep humility and patience for the hour when a new clarity is delivered: that alone is to live, in the understanding and in one’s own mortality.

Another grain of sand...

And I'm off. Belated, perhaps, but not in anyway deterred. Delayed, but not at all denied. My debt has been repaid and I'd be lying if I claimed that being on a beach halfway across the world didn't do me good as well. Yet now it's time to get back to business. I made plans, way back when I was young. I had to choose between the life of being and the life of doing. And I leapt at the latter like a trout to a fly. But each deed I did, each act, bound me to itself and to its consequences, and made me act again and yet again. Now, very seldom do I come upon a space, a time like this, between act and act, when I may stop and simply be. Or wonder who, after all, I am.