The Bardo

And in crossing the bridge we were told we could never go back. This brought hope deflated by expansiveness. We were wrong. It is in fact out duty to go back inside the caves. How funny it is to strive for such great heights only to find the ultimate wisdom can only be found within those who cannot remember theirs.  Every indefinite height returns to mud. The same muddy beginning where I made my filth every genuine reason to exist. Don’t let anyone tell you that dead ends are empty. It is not the experience but the mindset which matters. Even sunken eyes find love in each others reflections. Sometimes better. But looking back breeds longing so I keep moving forward. The present seethes with new meaning for different reasons. Yet I will always miss the days when our sweat saliva drug dust and dopamine interlaced the nights and made us inseparable. One basic ambition with twenty heads. Stay alive. More than that. And less. Stay eager.  If I hadn't tinkered with reality (and in finding it so terribly malleable bashed it to smithereens) I may have remained the same flat cardboard of my youth. Drawing outside the lines was not the issue. I needed the basics. Pick the crayon up. And after, pick up a few more things and create(destroy?) something new.

“New” is a myth in the ethos of the young. How unoriginal our back alley plight might have been, were it not for the how authentically we fought to remain untethered. This was not our weekend job. There was no moment left to be undone. It’s really a miracle any of us made it out alive which proves two things. There are blessings even in back alleys. And god loves the fuck ups. We were always the ones left with all the dirty work. Nine to fivers suppress with excessive force every intuitive drive for greater sensation. We release it. someone’s got to do it. if we all took our share it might not have manifested this way. But when conformity rules supreme the dissidence cannot be diluted.  We revolutionized the purpose by having none. We felt the microscopic in a magnanimous way.  Nothing went unfelt. We could spend hours playing with fingertips and it surely mattered when the hairs on the back of our necks switched directions. For us, the hardest pill to swallow was reality. Cold. Prescribed. How could we bear it? the answer was-together.

Disillusion is beautiful. And that makes perfect sense. Why else would people willingly feed it so long? My own appetite was almost insatiable. Yet the light switch always presents itself. It is at the end of a long hallway. That same curiosity which brought you to the doorsteps of your destiny now takes you to the basement. Down here it is dark. Destiny does not follow you. Nothing but choice and blind leaps of faith. The first one makes you want to leave. And the exit sign is always a faint glow at the back of the room. But you know where that one leads. And that next step is still a mystery. You might be down here with others but it’s too dark to tell. Until your own light shines bright enough you’ll have to get used to the feeling of potential oblivion underneath every step. Death comes and she befriends you. Not the final breath. But a death and decay which unlatches all your anchors and tears away the map. The old symbols no longer translate. Learning to speak silence is like unwinding the clock only to find that time no longer exists. Too many steps in the wrong direction lead to redundancy only alleviated by surrender. It is already here. Stop trying so hard. But trying hard was the only thing I was good at.

Others saw it in me before I saw it in myself. To them it was self-evident. But trapped inside a singular lens the perspective seems typical until someone else reminds you how difficult it is for everyone else to walk on their hands. Coming right side up is disorienting. But it’s worthwhile to check in and see if there is a reason so many preferred to remain upright and rigid. So far, I still can’t tell. I let the blood rush back to my brain and laugh at how strange it looks when people talk to me.  They think it’s so important that I hear them. It’s not that I don’t care, but first they should try listening to themselves. But then they might get to the point where the voice becomes loud and immutable, and if demands are being made to roll in the mud and stand on hands and run with reckless abandon into the night-resistance to silliness minimizes the message. The demands of the heart may seem trivial. But if you don’t love yourself enough to give an occasional gift of blatant disregard for those around you, you better start spending more time on your own. The greatest gift I ever received is friends who made me feel all alone. No judgment. No holding back. Only full flung singing to a wilderness memory of finitude. With friends like that you find the shore to the other side, but even something which supported will eventually hold back.

You must step willingly and fully into the abyss to complete the process. no one may follow. if they follow, they follow in their own way and the hallway ends in a different place. but we all inhibit the same building. come knock on my door before i decide to leave the bardo and walk out into the rain.