the root
Like the root, just letting the wind and water pass over, and all the insects accrue. Indivisible from the light particles and the motes in the air, all us of unthinking, unable to process pain. The nervous system is one of the cruellest tricks evolution has played. The nearly infinite capacity to suffer. Imprisonment through birth in a body. I should have stayed in the leaves. Sap in a tree when dinosaurs still roamed. But present not just there (in the bodies of ancient insects, at the bottom of ancient seas). The unconstricted me, everywhere at once because not yet pieced together by mother and father. There is a gratefulness, yet a profound unhappiness to be so stricken by life that I fear losing it, even though none of us really has it -- all that is an illusion. I only think I am because I am no longer the water-logged root. What has value in me, if none of it is real, if I am only writing this between stations? Spend all my life learning things that will be gone in an instant. Not understood, almost never seen, glimpsed once or twice like the ghost of an image floating behind closed eyelids. These are pieces of thought, little shards of (I guess) my overall philosophical mirror. Ground I walk on mentally while the body goes its own positivist way. I can be both things at once: positive and pessimistic. Loathing and loving. Mostly happy, grateful. Disappointed in self, proud of me. Growing big only to ultimately break down. The big pain is not in any of this, but in my otherness, my world which does not seem to admit a population larger than the too-proud I.