with the plants
It hasn't sunk in yet. The dirt, the rotting plants, the sprouting seed, the rain and the sun, the air, all of it still somehow on the surface of a depth of an experience that I am still descending into. My first real job in more than a decade, the prospect of money shimmering like heat off the pavement in the distance, my tired, aching body huffing along the highway of desolation and death. The story is in the making. You have to see a vision of an occurrence... something that happened. There has to be an Event. And then there has to be an overcoming, a transcendence.
My story starts with the event of leaving home. I left like an irritated child. It's hard to remember exactly how I felt. But it's easy to remember my circumstances.
In the first place, memory is completely abstract. I cannot see a literal vision, or hear my voice as I said goodbye to my father.
It's the motion. It's the activity of being alive. It is always an ever accruing experience building and building upon the crest of our own wave washing towards the shore.
In part it was the foreknowledge of death. That in itself seems like the primary challenge. Death, in it's total blackness and invisibility will meet us all, of course, of course. But one can't go about moping or living life in perpetual fear, so there has to be a way out. For us, the living, we take life in stride, alongside everyone else. Always remaining blind to the obvious conclusion. There is only vacuum after death, the vacuum of your absence amongst the living. The force of that vacuum only depends on the mass of the character involved in the dying. The dying all around us, if you look closely. Dead leaves and grass in winter, roadkill along the highway, relatives suddenly removed, it is no wonder that we conclude we are being taken away by a more ultimate authority. We are being ushered out quietly. The living live on and that is proof of life after death. We've only set up the scene. We have explained nothing by dancing around nothing as if it didn't exist. But that is what stares down a human being when they consider death, nothing. Granted, many trick themselves into a foreknowledge of unknown and unverifiable claims. Heaven and Hell and Afterlife are words that perform the magic deed. They are words suited to metaphor, because no one can attest to a literal vision of an actual heaven or an actual hell or an actual afterlife beyond.
My way out was more direct. I headed straight for the door, then the highway and the great open sky. I left purposefully with no money at all, no food, but plenty of water. And I hitchhiked the highways all the way East to D.C. I made it, filthy and reeking and sunburned, and I had had a vision. My vision was in the form of two dreams. The first came just before I left home. In the dream I am in bed and sleeping when my body begins to float upward and through the ceiling and upward further into a total black nothingness until I scream from terror as every memory slips away. As I scream, my body is placed back in bed but immediately starts floating upwards again. I scream in terror again, knowing that I am headed for oblivion. But, I am immediately put back in bed upon screaming and begin floating upwards again. This happens over and over until the specter of terror is so large that I scream loud enough to awaken my paralyzed sleeping body. But as I scream I am slung back into bed flat and the covers are pulled up swiftly above my head, as my sleeping self jolts up at the end of a scream.
The second dream comes a while later, after I had travelled carefree for the first time. I am again found in this dream of floating upwards, but this time, with the foreknowledge that it must be a dream, I decided not to fear. This was easier to decide than to act out. As I started floating beyond earth and losing memory of everything familiar I again became distressed and let out a scream. As in the first dream, I was placed back in my sleeping body then started rising immediately, again. After screaming a few more times, I finally was able to restrain my fear, to let go of everything familiar, my own identity, my own awareness. But after floating through nothing I suddenly became aware of a light that grew and grew brighter and brighter until the brightness of it could not be contained in my sleeping self and I awoke in a state of perfect contentment. And I was liberated. Death was nothing but a forgetting, the fear is shortsighted and ego-driven.
I want to help people. I truly do. But, I do not believe that is as easy as it sounds. My influence can be questionable at times. Now I am allowing someone to influence me. As I have not allowed many living people that honor. There is a coming together, and an upward motion. Into the world I surrender so I may gain from the experience and know my fellow men and women.