what is this
There is such a drive to close our hands around each other: to make sense, to narrativize the raw chaos of experience into something… manageable. Functional. Known. I feel this because that happened… Why did you do that? What did you mean? This is often one of my favorite games: the effort to decode you, to get more surface area (or so I imagine), to slurp up the data. The infrastructure of the world was not built by sitting, gaping, perm-astonished at the incredible fact that we exist, that experience flows through us like water through a grate: not fixed even for a moment.
When felt, the fact of impermanence can be terrifying, vertiginous. In each tiny micro-second in meditation that I release thought (before instantly resuming) I feel naked. There are many reasons to strip– the sheer glory of being in the mystery, for one. The one I’m present to today is diversity. I want a forest full of beings: the many, many beings of you in any moment, and me, and the “us,” and the room, and the crick-crick-crick on the wall.
A contraction happens in my need to know, my fantasy that I could know. And it can get so strong– till we are ducked into one corner together, picking apart a dream. I want that dream! I want all the other things also, that blinker out of awareness when we glue into figuring it out.
Don’t explain it to me. For once. For sixty minutes. Don’t explain it. Confuse me again and again. More things can live then. Things may creep out of the underbrush whose faces we’ve barely dreamt. It’s real. See, and see again. It’s all real, beyond the representations. What is this? No, not the explanation. What is this?