These are the dimensions of finding/losing One Self /
Your identity is subject to deconstruction /
Shams says: Treasure is found in ruins /
I have been looking for me there /
Tossing and turning into Some One /
This is a map to somewhere that no longer exists /
Your brain is a map of someone that no longer exists /
All pattern recognition from another time /
The past and future haven’t met yet /
You are the moment of collision /
Now /
This will likely hurt /
Cradle grief like a soft animal /
Being nobody kills you until it doesn’t /
We had peach cobbler in Cobden when I finally found myself again. I had been losing it through years of overworking. It was late summer. A perfect temperature. The sky was bright blue. There was something about the way the long green stalks carried their flowers from the earth towards the sun. It looked like some sort of sacred ceremony. Treasures offered at the altar of our holy harvest star. I found my finger on the shutter of my old camera that pointed at those flowers. In an instant I recognized an excitement that had been absent for too long. A relief. There you are, I thought. It was a short reunion, but it clicked, and turned out to be important medicine for the years that came after.
The fall that followed announced itself like a bad omen. A fateful destination. But who in their right mind could foresee their own dissolution? Who would want to know?
I recall the panic on the edge of the abyss. It’s a visceral memory. A sensation unlike anything I had ever experienced. If I jump, I lose everything. And: There is nowhere else to turn. This fall is inescapable. It will shatter everything I know and love.
It was dreadful. It destroyed me. It was the most liberating experience of my life. I remember a moment, many months into the dissolution, where I felt precisely like nobody, void of form, no home, no belongings, no hope, no plans, no path, no solutions, when I suddenly began laughing out loud. Out of the blue, and without reason. This laughter sprang from a deep and spirited alliance with the absurdity of my predicament; this existence. My mind had become a psychedelic playground, grief being the only substance I consumed, daily.
I walked around aimlessly, most of the time. Noticing the quiet presence of a million forms shooting up from the soil. I held my camera, as a witness, and kept clicking. Zooming in and out. Looking for something and nothing in particular. The flowers kept me tethered to a reality in which beauty still existed. I found out flowers bloom year round. They simply take turns. Despite all that was lost, the magenta pistil covered in neon yellow powder continued answering the prayers of the bee.
Nature is an honest mirror. It doesn’t ask for our composure. It lets us sit with the compost for however long it takes. The flowers implored to sink deeper into nothingness. Or allthingness. Into temporal becoming and unbecoming. Into opening and closing with the curtain calls of a cyclical order. I became a member. Born again chrysalis. An un-ending emergence (an emergency.) Decomposed fruit; the seeds of which withstand the storms and tests of time. Phenomenally unfurling into existence.
Once dissolved, I remembered. There you are.
Metaphysical Mulch 