#393

393 is an incredible number. Don't even have to explain how cool it is probably. In honor of the graceful mathematics inherent in this integer, my goal for today is to reach deep, deep within, grasp with all the strength I have and try and draw forth something that skews positive. Today I must ignore the prancing demons and rapacious dragons that work hard and smart every day to make the world a grindhouse of misery.

*

Jesus Christ, it's fucking difficult. It even hurts. I cannot raise sword or spear and slay these shadows, and typing furiously is the next-best thing. To say nothing, to try and think about something else these days generates a feeling reminiscent of my flesh being eaten by parasitic worms. I assume. It's the flesh of my spirit, which knows a universe of pain my body can only approximate.

That cuts both ways, though. What we mean when we say joy is transcendent is that it forgets the body, as the spirit is illuminated and warmed by a more complete light than exists in the material world.

Sunlight on the skin is just a game mechanic. Light radiating unto the spirit is real, the real thing. 

To paraphrase Master Yoda: luminous beings are we, not these crude vestments.

*

It is true that rain falls on the just and the unjust. It follows that light shines on them with that same universal impassivity. What can we learn from this? That the universe is not concerned with fair portions or what we think of as justice. There is a higher justice corresponding to a larger picture, to more complete datasets, subject to a wisdom we cannot comprehend, limited as we are by current hardware.

*

What has always struck me ever since I was a child, which so profoundly bothered the nuns and priests I discussed it with, was how in the world human beings can pretend to know the mind of God, if God is God. They would reply that Jesus was man and God, and the word of God was made manifest through him and through his chosen disciple Peter, but I knew enough to know that a bunch of dudes decided that at a meeting, basically, hundreds of years after the fact, and the question stood. They would tell me that I was being  bad boy, that these questions and arguments were heretical and trended towards atheism, and I would reply--directly in some cases, to myself  that Jesus did the same thing with the elders and if Jesus asked difficult questions of his masters, it was my duty to emulate the act. For are we not to imitate Christ in all ways? And therefore, why do we possess and luxuriate and earn and spend while there are slums full of poor people not ten miles from this chapel? Shouldn't we all be as poor as the poorest of us? Shouldn't we spurn the gross material and seek the end of man's dominance over his fellow man? Doesn't almost everything in this book you say is the word of God contradict how we choose to live our lives, admonish us to act upon the very things we ignore, push us to be better than the mere Word and enter into an Act? Isn't God beyond language, beyond morals, beyond history, beyond the future? Isn't the infinite inifinite? If it isn't, how can it be God? And if it is, how can we act this way, as though we were not God, and everyone we meet is not God, and the world we live in is not God? Because we act as though God is dead, even as you force me to pray and sing at him in chapel. But who is this God you make me sing at? Some old man? Just a dude making rules and telling only certain other dudes? A zombie, a corpse's voice from beyond the grave, a mannequin? One that watches only me, and only I have to feel bad and watch my step, only me and the other little people who really care, and lets people who don't care do whatever they want, including wage wars and raise empires and buy and sell human beings? In the name of the Lord? Because if in our ignorance we fuck up our lives literal eternity will be unimaginable torment? Impossible. Impossible. Horrifying on so many levels.

Apparently not. This accumulation did indeed build and resolve in a long stretch of atheism before a return to facing the infinite. All that time since childhood, all that time since then: I still don't get it.

*

Preceding is why I'm never surprised when kids are about fifty times smarter than grownups. Some kids are already grownups when they're kids, and they're the only kind of stupid kid, because they have learned quickly to act like they have all the answers. At least most kids still know enough to ask the right questions, while grownups have trained themselves to be satisfied with easy answers. And that satisfaction, that complacency, is what Jesus was trying to disrupt with his most oblique parables and radical pronouncements. And it is what I encountered in so many of the priests and nuns of my childhood--behind an implacable, enameled wall of starched certainty, which was an insult to the spirit of inquiry they professed to inculcate. 

I do not get along with those who have left childhood behind them as a cast-off thing of little if any present significance or value in general or particular. I am still a child. I hope to remain a child, and fight constantly to preserve myself. Children have a right to be children and be as children are, which is, frankly, quite a huge, frightening, and complex endeavor. A journey fraught with peril. 

There is absolutely no advantage whatsoever in modifying yourself to be a grownup. Grownups have ruined everything. I suspected this as I asked my childhood questions, and everything I've seen and learned confirms it. There is very little defense for the world they have built; the worthwhile bits exist in spite of the main event, and the main event constantly tries to eliminate or pervert them.

*

Damn, did it again. Let's try again tomorrow or sometime, whenever. 

--JL

#340

What an August it has been! So much has happened since last I pounded symbols into these pixels. Indeed, initially, I typed out three weeks, reflecting that it feels more like four. In fact, no! It has been only sixteen days, evidence that not all of life is lived in the same chronometrical rhythm. Veritable cascades of impressions, changes, and conversations, further remarkable in that I have, despite being on vacation, largely hewed to a simple routine, stable despite multitudinous modifiers and prevailing conditions.

Some examples? Why not!

*

August is fourteen days old today, which is a great and very old-school unit of time which makes it for me to measure some things by--a fortnight. In the fort of these nights and days of a two-week period, which is, besides a very sensible span by many utilitarian measures, a comfortable unit of memory to me--the glowing coal of the most recent discrete chunk of time, past, but not yet the past, speaking loosely and subjectively. Anyhow I've taken a dozen round-trips on my bicycle in that time, during which the air quality has been mercifully almost always good. 

Some have been absolutely incredible rides. The worst was merely great. Stuff has happened to me like yesterday a young buck burst out of the scrub not ten meters from me diagonally in full career off the left side of the street, bolted across it, and made as if to zag in my direction; in my zeal to get a good look at the buck in movement I forgot all caution and actually sped up. The buck zagged away, across the path, and into the woods on the right. An air show is in the area and yesterday, too, many strange planes were flying around making some truly remarkable noises, which I factor as a catalyst to the weird but exhilarating deer behavior I personally experienced. Apparently one of the planes crashed later in the day. Bunch of 'em still flying around.

Other things I have seen include many people going about their day in many different modes of being; riding bikes also, puttering about their yards, driving their cars, walking along, being with animals, doing chores or paid work or nothing at all; sometimes, doing bizarre shit, as is normal and expected. For example, one man was shirtless on his porch, delivering a kind of monotone, medium-volume rant which seemed to me the indication of a banked but potentially explosive rage. This interpretation may have colored the impression I received of his holding a large revolver loosely in his right hand. I was never closer than about seven meters and moving along at a good clip I saw no reason to slack on, so my perceptions are by no means certain. Saw a man wandering up and down the strip separating a thoroughfare from a long drive that runs parallel screaming on his cell phone to someody about everything he could see happening interspersed with the outline of a vast conspiracy arrayed against him. He was doing the same from within a car that sat there abandoned ever since that day--perhaps ten days ago--till at least three days ago. 

Many amazing birds--goldfinch pairs, mourning doves, hawks and eagles, turkey vultures, woodpeckers, bluejays, crows, grackles, sparrows, starlings. Some of the flights and activities I have caught glimpses of has been very satisfying indeed--painterly, jewel-bright, elements of a ride which elevate its nature. To ride at the same speed of a low-flying bird not two armslengths away is such a snapshot of motion in space, such a spontaneous unification with the great dance of those who ride the wind with just their bodies, who in that moment seem to be saying, in the language of movement, "hey, you almost could be flying." The memories are all very dear to me, incandescent with that feeling of being close to flight, which is the best part about riding a bicycle.

Could go on and on, but there's other kinds of stuff to it all, which I want to be sure and try and cover. Onwards!

*

Read the incredible History, Big History, & Metahistory, ed. David C. Krakauer, John Lewis Gaddis, & Kenneth Pomeranz, from the Santa Fe Institute Press. It really was fucking phenomenal. Pursuing the Giordano Bruno thread with a certain avidity, I am rereading Lucretius' On The Nature of Things, which is cool but I think I would like to try a different translation. Pursuing concepts from the first book mentioned, also reading the other SFI Press book I have, Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute 1984-2019, ed. David C. Krakauer. Also Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, by bell hooks. If I get through those before my vacation is up, I should like to read a small book I have about Logic, or perhaps a book about Math.  

*

The Pontiac Vibe I drive finally shit the bed, so I've been driving Ezra to his job at summer camp in the van, which has been nice time together for us, and this amount of driving has resulted in listening to a lot of different music, following several programs of interest. Those pope teleplays were basically made by the music they wove into their picture, and consequently I have explored their soundtracks and gained an interest in recent electropop. Also this metal band Cattle Decapitation. Other recent trends inclue reacquainting myself with my CD collection and some of the stuff you can't really stream, like Cutting Room Floor's first album and its nested solo projects. Also a live Bob Marley & The Wailers show, Babylon by Bus, which presented its most enjoyable-ever listen--it had been a very long time, and I experienced many aspects and consequences of my maturation very positively through the sounds and ideas on this record. Beautiful. Plus I had never fully realized how amazing the guitar playing is.

*

On the gaming front, I concluded the storyline of Tears of the Kingdom. Absolutely phenomenal. There's a good thirty-five percent of the game still before what one might term true completion, and I have continued with some relish. The end of the story was one of the most gorgeous things that has ever happened to me. From the descent, which I performed from the highest reachable sky island, to the dazzling conclusion, it was perhaps the best ending to any Zelda game ever. Some finales have presented more of a challenge, some were mechanically denser, and the aesthetics of each places it firmly in a Golden Palace type situation, but for me, right now, this one leads the pack. Nintendo saw fit to release some Pokémon games on its official subscription ROM bank, and for some reason the Game Boy Color game featuring the Pokémon TCG really hooked me in. I've reached the Elite Four equivalent of that game.

*

On the social front, a friend I met during winter semester in class is staying with us while she figures out a housing situation. Been nice having a guest, some fun stuff. We saw Oppenheimer with her and her girlfriend, have shared many enlivening conversations, etc. That movie was super good, by the way. She even helped me move my dear friend Persephone's stuff from a storage unit to her new apartment, which was a nice fun time. 

Due to scholarly and transportation-rooted consideration, I've terminated my employment as a school bus driver on excellent terms, deciding that returning after vacation would finally present more logistical problems than it was worth. I'll get a more humble and less demanding position somehwere I can walk or bike to, just as I can walk or bike or bus to school. This is brought up by way of saying that this is why I could apparently so cold-bloodedly partake of ganja and trip on shrooms while in my position; I was fairly certain at the outset it would come to this. 

All that and I should make time for a few other friends, and perhaps my old friend Len, he with whom I am freshly shroom-communed should be playing and recording more soundscapes--one of the things we did on our trip--and perhaps even playing a show. We shall see! I know from wearying experience that one should never speak too confidently of such things are reality before their time, indeed, even up to mounting the stage at showtime. Strange to even entertain the idea of playing onstage again, but with Len, I think the thing may just be plausible. 

*

My spiritual condition has been boosted tremendously by this break, and by reuniting with the bicycle as near-daily practice. Every day a great joy is sustained within me; passes through me and moves around me. My heart is moved towards compassion towards each of the people that I see, however fleetingly. Love my husband and my cats, my digs and my tempos. I feel as though I am at the leading crest of a great vibration, a wave of energy that is clean and refreshing and tuneful. Listening to God's mighty silence I hear the universe, its great rushing whisper. It is infinite, as are we all, though this journey is brief, as all that exists in the universe is brief in the reckoning of infinite time.  

Our lives are an immutable part of an allness. No element of or perspective in the infinite narrative is unnecessary. Thus, all that exists, exists in a perfect balanace of equal meaning with everything else, from the infinitesimal to the cosmic, from the first to the last and in infinite recurrence. 

That's just some of the thinking I've been entertaining, along with its further implications. Possibly I am entirely off-base. 

*

Alright, fuckers! Signing off. Pray for this odd sinner.

--JL

#332

Because of my grimy, checkered past, I find myself in the interesting position of being simultaneously denied the use of my financial aid by my institution, and called to be honored by them for outstanding academic performace. Guess the bodies in charge of these separate processes don't communicate that much, or at a very granular level, or something. An appeal has been filed, and I have been assured that it should be granted, but who knows. Haven't RSVP'd to the honors thing because even if all goes well I have a natural aversion to being honored and even if I got over that it would be too bitter, I think, for the opposite to take place and be honored and denied at the same time. I don't fuckin know. It's so much easier not to think about this stuff. When I got that email, about being denied financial aid despite all my A's and pulling my GPA up more than a full point, an old familiar part of me rose up in my chest cavity and told me to say fuck it, quit everything, go back to just reading whatever the fuck you want all the time and forget this noise. I won't--but can't pretend it wasn't a struggle for a minute. And I do miss being my own teacher and the only one, but this new situation is nice too, and I do like it. Perseverance! How annoyingly necessary, how perversely vital.

*

Went to the Toledo Zoo yesterday with Ezra and my mother-in-law. It was pretty great. It's so good to look at creatures. Organisms are fucking incredible. The whole enterprise was lent a special interest because I've been reading the work of Eugene M. Marais, specifically The Soul of the White Ant, and it's amazing work, and has me thinking a great deal about the nature of what life truly is, what constitutes it, e.g. the body and the possible interpretations of what a body is; where it begins and ends, and what life leaves behind when it departs what has been its vessel, or the billions of vessels which make up the vessels which make up the vessel. And in the end, is it all white light? The light of God, as the Sefirot says? That seems to be the secret that lies in quantum mechanics, in the oneness of the universe, in the illusory nature of the separateness of being. That we are vessels made of light, filled with light, and life and death only changes in refraction. A crystal universe, with infinite light radiating throughout. Concretions of imagination, metaphors and stories as atoms and molecules.

Also been reading that book I got about Giordano Bruno. Fucking good as FUCK.

*

Dunno. Maybe I'll write a letter to the Pope about it. He's supposed to know. Don't wanna bug the guy, really, but I'm curious about what he might say to me, if anything. I mean, the chances that the Pontifex of Rome would ever respond to any letter my apostasical ass would write him are so slim it is comical, but sometimes you write and mail a letter because it's a thing, not because you seriously expect anything out of it. There's a letter to Disney I'd also like to write, for all the difference that would make in the universe. 


--JL

#272

Ah, it's been a while since we encountered a number as good and perfect as 272. A real winner, in my opinion. The smallest amount of prime numbers that add up to the next prime. Beauty, eh?

So much beauty in this universe, and we hardly see or conceive the most infinitesimal fraction of it even collectively as a species all through infinite time, let alone individual perceivers in our own lifetimes. Tiny dreamers in an ocean unfathomable--subatomic particles in the surface layer.

We do not even feel the turbulent momentum flux. We do not feel how we float in a peace defined by the passing music of an almighty wind, sea and air composed of light--everything ultimately light.

One of the names of God: El, which is--Is, and every light, all light, omnipresent light. 

Just light. Every consciousness in the universe a light-recording machine made of light.

Astonishing, the concept of how necessary literally everything is, how totally and completely everything in creation needs to be. How essential our participation, however wayward or unwilling, in this infinite wholeness of which we are such an indispensable microcosm, containing infinite microcosms, part of macrocosms which are microcosms in their turn unto infinity, unto a great Radiance; a Radiance which gives infinite light and loses nothing of itself.

*

Cats be screaming for attention. Wanted to revisit each of the topics of this past year, but so it goes.

Peace, peace, PEACE BE UPON YE

--JL

#198

Finished up Stranger Things 3 (basically perfect, it is crazy what good writing happens in Stranger Things and knowing how much this kind of artwork pisses a certain kind of person off is just extra sugar) and also watched My Neighbor Totoro for the second time ever. The thing about that movie is how plausible and correct I find the yokai element* contrasted to how unbelievable I am forced to consider the actual human characters. Well, just one character. Everything is real in My Neighbor Totoro except for the father, who is a fantasy. Too good of a dude. 

Not saying dudes like this don't exist, or that their existence is not desirable. No, if you asked me, I would tell you that to be like him is everything I want; to be in that place in life and be the sort of man who acts and speaks as he does when faced with what he faced with and blessed with what he is blessed with ought be the aim and hope of every honest dude. But have I ever met anyone like that dude? I have not. Never.

I suppose, though, that most fathers have something in common with him. Mine does, different as they are. It's something in how they stand on their feet to balance the load. And other common mysteries whose answers lie bare to the sunshine, for all eyes to see, while somehow remaining secret.

*

One can't really spell these things out. It's why show and don't tell is the one short rule of writing I consider absolutely indispensable. It's why the character works, and works better than a "real" man; a character can be an emblem, a sigil; can emerge less formed from the collective unconscious and by its vagueness be more truthful. 

*

Beneath the heart and the head, oft-forgotten, lies the gut, without whom neither serve any purpose and could not even exist.** 

The gut does not think or feel. It cannot rule, and must make do with what it is given. It only tells the truth, and without it, we are lost.

*

God isn't in any detail, any explanation, any bloodline or object. 

God was only ever and can only ever be in the gut.

--JL

*to restate a position, I unequivocally believe in ghosts, fairies, monsters, gods. Everything is literally real.

**see Aesop's fable concerning the Belly and the Members. 

#119

One hundred and nineteen is a cool number. I don't have a lot of feelings about nineteen itself, but I like when eleven is smashed into anything anytime it happens. Also, one plus one plus nine is eleven. 

*

Some facts are inherently pleasurable. Pythagorean facts, little truths so elegant as to invoke worship. As some historically significant physicists and mathematicians have put it, that pleasure in finding things out and grasping the connections is the pleasure of discerning the mind of God; one of the goads of the human being, the ecstasy of spirituality, this action the universe takes in coming to know itself. Uncovering the Secrets of the Old One, as Stuart A. Kauffman put it.

*

Continuing from yesterday, one cannot deny the absolute truth of certain labels. "Identities". Roles we have no choice but to play, words we have no choice but to say. 

Freedom, by the way, is in no way compromised by these things that our agency cannot shift. One is not unfree merely because one cannot sprout wings and fly into the sky, for example. And it may be that we shall generate descendants, whether "artificial" or analog, who are able to do just that, not that it matters. At any rate, fixed conditions do not abrogate total freedom. I'll elaborate on that stance some other time; I have a different pointless point today.

*

That I am a writer, that I am a man of some kind, that I am Catholic, that I am an American citizen, that I am an immigrant, that I am an English speaker and a Spanish speaker, that I posses a genetic map which to some worldviews renders me a "mongrel of the worst nightmare variety"*, that I got some mental health and activity quirks, that I am able-bodied and sighted and hearing, that I am a worker, all of these are facts I cannot deny and act as lenses through which I may be viewed and through which I have no choice but to view the world, unless I engage in acts of massive and useless self-denial.

Yeah, they're part of my identity, everyone has them. But a gem isn't its facets; facets are cut into gems by humans, just as identities are etched into you by the world. A gem, just as a human being, is in its material, its components, the arrangement of its atoms, its hardness, the colors at its heart.

Identity is the most outside part, the quickest and least descriptive shorthand. I try to dispense with it insofar as it is possible, but it is undeniable that the outside, being what is in the most constant with the world, will affect how the center holds and looks even to itself, how it is able to signify and codify according to the world. The race thing, my god! An emerald is green and a sapphire is blue and a ruby is red. I got news for you: they are the same stone. But they're not! But they are.

What is meant when it is said that we are made in God's own image is not that we are monkeys that stand upright, which really is a very fundamentally stupid fucking read. To imagine that God put the asshole in just because "he" has one too is simply concussed. 

We are God because God is the paradox. God is the universe unfolding and watching the universe unfold from the lowest to the highest, from the incomprehensible micro to beyond the Void. Our atoms are a part of that unfolding, our cells, our tissues, our bodies and spirits and the ideas we generate and the things that we make, from the greatest to the least.

Alpha and Omega. One over infinity and infinity over one.

*

So when I admit to these labels, it essential to qualify that I see these things in my own way and have drawn my own conclusions, because I make a conscious efforts to feel my own feelings about them, and no one else's.

Because honestly, I have no use for solidarity. Seems to me a parasite-concept, something manipulative individuals use to steal people's life energy and choices and even get them killed for a liar's cause.

There is little I appreciate less than when I hear someone invoking something that I am, like, say, "The Latino or Hispanic vote" or the incredibly nefarious "People of Color",  or the by now truly nauseating "the 'LGBTQI+/-' community", and ascribing to in any monolithic characteristics or boiling it all down to a sound bite to win an argument or justify bullshit. 

Nope. Nope. Only way is to do my own thing with what I got, with what I'm given. To do my own work my own way. I don't march, I avoid rallies, I don't go to Mass, I don't go to meetings, I don't hold up signs. I do not accept umbrella thinking, I refuse all implicit and tacit agreement with "my own". Extrapolation that I am on anyone's--anyone's--side is irresponsible and always incorrect. I own only myself, and no one owns me. I am not on anybody's side. Don't care how good it sounds, how much you cry about it or try to make me seem like the devil's own turdpolisher. I don't endorse. I keep the distance I need to survive.

Even if I like everything a person makes, even if I gush about their accomplishments and pay them compliments, it's just human recognition. I harbor no illusions that their capacity to generate beautiful and necessary work that I appreciate and have sustained myself with makes them "good" people; I myself am a high-level wretch and have known too many other artists too well. There are only people. I appreciate, I agree, but even when I cry "Yes! Perfect!"  I mean only for me, and what I am crying about in that moment, and not for everyone. I do not aggrandize, or engage in idol worship; I do not endorse. I eat what I need to in order to survive.

Should anyone suggest that instead of surviving you ought to give your life to or for a cause, or that the only way to survive is to follow where they lead, or invoke a need to act as they say on behalf an agglomerate of humans, for concepts they say are justice or peace or goodness or right--causes, selves, and ideas they are, of course, selling--just, please. 

Think twice. More, if you have to. Don't ever let anyone tell you that there isn't time to think things through. Don't die for a liar. Don't live under shadows.

*

In short, way too much fucked up nonsense gone down because of people all getting together under a banner, and I don't play that shit.


--JL

*read this about myself on the internet when I was twelve years old. It was kind of funny back then, then for a while it wasn't, now it's pretty funny again. I take that pleasure and pride in it which I suspect is reserved specifically for mongrels and especially immigrant mongrels, as it is born of the acceptance of a very particular perspective. Neither fish nor fowl nor good whatever the hell, you hear some stuff you weren't meant to hear and some stuff you can't believe you have to hear again. All such a bad, bad joke. 

Anyway, my miscegenation is the bomb and I am the glorious future and the hope of this timeline, fight me

#12

II.

Habit becomes conviction, conviction becomes passion, and in passion, vocation becomes illuminated. Our vocations determine our paths; in this case, with hilarious literality.

The fastest I've ever walked a mile in a straight line is between seven and eight minutes, which is only a little slower than I can run one. The furthest I've ever walked in a day is somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five to forty-five miles. The type of walking is important context--one can place different value per mile depending on city traversal, country miles, mixed terrain, footing, load, humidity, altitude, and depending on adverse conditions, which can place us in the five to fifteen mile range when reckoning my more hardcore walks. The coldest temperatures I have ever dealt with on a walk were about negative fourteen degrees Celsius with negative thirty on the wind chill. The hottest day I've walked was about forty degrees. 

The high temperature was in the desert, east of Qatar. The lowest was right here at home. In Massachusetts I "walked" up an eighty-five degree grade, and in the Andes and in the Porcupine Mountains I carefully slid sideways down a similar slopes. In jungle, desert, swamp, cloud forest, cliff country, scrub, cities, suburbs, steppes, strips, railroad tracks, in unknown towns and neighborhoods and hundreds of times along the same haunts and pounds and efficient courses. O, to achieve as many more of my artless, scruffy, meandering walks in as many strange and wonderful places as I have the luck and wherewithal to reach in my limited wandering upon this wide and sacred Earth! 

I've walked with about a dozen different CD players and iPods, wearing a heaping variety of earbuds and regular little plastic headphones and big heavy noise-canceling wraparounds, wearing many years worth of messenger bags and backpacks crammed full over a lifetime of lugging the most absurd crap and cruft and enough loose sheets of paper to fill the winds of hurricane. Dozens of shoes and boots have been walked to pieces. I've needlessly carried trumpets, tubas, bass guitars, bags of books, athletic duffels full of gear, folders full of papers or paperback books tucked under one arm, simply to avoid a ride and walk instead--with a busted knee, with broken ribs, with smashed toes, in spite of migraines, through colds, in frightening fog, soaking rain, incredible stenches, driving winds loaded with particulate or shrieking, dangerous levels of noise, through clouds of midges and plagues of mosquitoes and streaking insanities of black flies, through long grass and close brush, weaving through dense copses far from the beaten path and standing out alone against the sky on a naked ridge, splashing through a ford or tripping across a bridge or balancing along a log over a creek. Alone and in the company of a whole biography of ghosts, and alone.

Thoughts come to you from different angles, old ways blooming into new improbabilities and gleaming realizations plunging like stars into the depths of your own unsounded knowledge. The way opens you up to insights and ideas that one cannot acquire unless one is afoot and plunging ahead, mindful without mind of the breath in the lungs and the wind and the sky. The sight and sound of all the birds and beasts and human persons and all the other living things and the inorganic bedrock and constructed scaffolding, all the angles and vectors and trajectories and fractals; all the new avenues to understanding the world you all walk through together, transforming one another, day after day. And the highest of all, the loss of self, the pure forgetfulness, the being caught up in the undifferentiated glory of creation, the infinite God within breathing coeval with the infinite God without, all boundaries sundered, all veils parted.

You never remember, because memory can't hold it. You can't say what you learn, because it is something you know, and knew, and will always know, and this knowledge is held in kind with knowledge held in the hearts of every soul that ever lived, but it isn't anything words can compass or draw into the world of symbols, because it isn't singular knowledge and it isn't interchangeable, but infinite, immutable, and absolutely silent.

Whispers of it make it into the songs that well up inside you, if you're lucky. You try to put it into the way you hold the people you love, when you're lucky enough to hold them. Into the heart you love in common. The best of your prayers. 



--JL