A Raft Takes You Nowhere

Jim Chambers pushed his shaky wooden raft along with a long branch he had broken from a fallen tree. The bottom of the pond was only a few feet below him, but he didn’t want to get his one set of clothes dirty. Not many came out this way, but he was more proud than broke.

As he passed, green dots of algae dispersed from larger congregations like children streaming out a of church after a long sermon. Birds sang courerpoint to the sloshy rhythm  of his improvised propellant moving in the water. His panting drowned out any nuance to be heard. He wiped is brow, removing the result of his physical effort meeting the monsoon season.

Just one more pass, he thought. Every day this summer he arose, dressed in his lone outfit, and headed to the lake. Every day, he expected to see her, just as he imagined. After all, the others had seen her there. They couldn’t all be lying.

Could they?

As he neared the shore, his heart began to sink. She should already be there, he thought. He could clearly see her footprints now on the damp shore.

Every day he had come this far. Every day, it seemed that he had just missed her. The sun turned the reclusive mountain peak a golden shade. Jim snuck a peek through a crack in the curtain of trees, then looked again at the shore. His eyes began to adjust.

His momentum carried him past the point of his furthest penetration. His body usually took control by now, routing him back to the remainder of his day, through its apogee, and back again to the lake shore. Now it did not interfere with the anarchy in his mind.

His thoughts became stuck in the molasses of the moment. Somehow, in crossing that invisible line, he had slipped beyond a fog of sleep into a world alive in his senses. A world alive in his soul.

It was there all along. Just a bit further on the shore, her footprints led to a path through the trees. He waited long enough to be sure he would only be sacrificing his pants below the knee to the dark waters. He stepped off of the raft, slipping enough to value his dryness even more by the time his feet touched the dewy ground.

He stood still for an eternity, waiting for his story to continue as if his godlike author had fallen behind. Soon, he felt time move once more like a train on freshly laid rails. This is knowing, he heard silently.

Jim Chambers followed the path into the trees, tasting her steps with his eyes until the lake dissapeared. He did not look back.

I Dream to Dare

Sitting in her midst, it seemed likely that I would remember the book names that she was reciting. After all, I had asked. I held her eye and relaxed, letting her words and the sound of her voice soak my brain like cool water in a dry sponge.

Then I thought, “What if I forget?”

And I did. All but the second title and the last.

Why? Sleep, of course. Real remembering is connecting pieces rather than adding things to a shelf. You know the difference between the memory of the pizza joint phone number and the sight of your first child. Never had one? You still have things that compare. They’re almost invisible, forming the web of your essence. They just are.

The first book title caught me lifting the blinds, the second came through the open window. Then I slept, dreaming that I had forgotten the titles. I awoke in time to catch the last one. Laying on the sandy bottom of a shallow tidal pool as the sun filters through passing waves, I sleep. Feeling the cool air on my cheeks as my face breaches the surface, air filling my lungs with the scent of the salty ocean, I awaken.

Does that mean I was absolutely awake? What does that mean in the realm of dreams? That level of being is nothing special. We all have it like a magic wand in the hand of a sleeping child.

What are you dreaming about?

Change Will Do You Good

 

Stepping from one world into another can be quite chaotic.

In The Terminator, the Governator drops from the sky – naked, as does Reese, Sarah Conner’s protector.  This wasn’t just to get buns on screen.  It emphasized the transition of state from future to past.  

Take it home into your own space:  If you could zap through your cell phone and instantly transport to wherever your caller is – but only if you’re naked – how often would you do it?  I’d buy stock in fitness and weight loss centers.

State transitions are chaotic.  Don’t take my word for it, ask nature.  After all, if this world is really made out of the nothing you had to create it, wouldn’t it mirror its interior structure somehow? 

Does your shape have anything to do with your bone structure?

Winter turns to spring.  There’s always that one last snow, the one that comes later than anyone expects.  Or else we find the early spring, followed by a late frost.  

A watched pot never boils.  Until it does.

A sonic boom.  The beating of notes when tuning a guitar. Finding a station on an old AM radio.  What, you never had a rotary dial?  

State transitions are characterized by rapid swings back and forth, like a flag flapping in the wind.  First, there is one state, then wild oscillation that almost touches either possible state, then another state.   The planets and stars do it, the earth’s magnetic field does it.  The markets do it.  So does your state of consciousness, and your level of being – not that anyone of consequence is judging.  

Change.  Isn’t there some kind of book of changes?  Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?  Change is.  Change does.  Change is as it does.  Time balances change.  Change is the flow of time.

Life is change.  Change is life.  You can point at their artifacts, but you can never catch them on film.  They belong to the present, which has no dimension.  

Being nothing, they can only be experienced by nothing.

There is no where without dimension.  There are no directions in nowhere.

Yet, there’s exactly enough time for everything to happen in the future, and exactly enough time to fit the past.  And don’t worry, the present will never lose your luggage.  

You can always pick it up when you get somewhere.

Gangsta’s Paradise

 

The real story behind the big hit... yeah, right.

Song had charisma.

It was the year 613 AD. The Sui Dyansty ruled the land of Yingzhou. A ’skilled magician’ named Song Zixian gained followers by making a room glow and projecting images of snakes, men and animals in a mirror.  He said that these images were the forms in which they would be ‘reincarnated as’.

Imagine how many fans you could get if you could convince people you are Biggie Smalls?  Ok, bad example.  Elvis?  How about Buddha?

Song led a coup against the current powers-that-be that resulted not only in his defeat, but in the execution of ‘over a thousand families’ suspected of collaborating with him.  If you figure a ‘family’ of that time is at least two generations, the carnage was heavy.

Where did Song get the idea that he was the prophesied return of Buddha?

Enter Mani, who probably hung out somewhere in the area we know as Iraq, but back in the day – like 210 AD.  He chilled with the Elkasites when he was young, but when he met the Mandaeans, his mind was blown.  See, the Elkasites had some cool ideas, but they were the sugar in the kool-aid of the rest of their artificial flavorings.  The Mandaeans probably still have some non-kool-aid cool shit, but since the current war, they’ve been pretty much wiped out.  Obviously, Mani wasn’t completely taken by the Mandaeans, since one of their big ideas is to keep your mouth shut, lest someone take their cool shit and make it wak.  

Yeah, he was an original gangsta.

Now, Mani was epic.  He created a script and a dogma which you would recognize in the hardcore Gnostic writings found in the North African desert, the Nag Hammadi.  You know what I’m talking about.   Mani’s crew spread to China not too soon after he died, wearing blue bandanas and riding carriages that could do three wheel motion.  

Well, maybe the ideas spread through diffusion, but picturing Ice Cube crossing the Gobi is worthy of a moment of pensiveness.  

Ok, done.

The Mahayana crew split into factions, with Mani’s dudes externalizing everything important that might have passed through, adding arrows and swords to the mix on occasion.  Maybe I exaggerate, maybe I don’t. Who knows?

So Song is one of Mani’s boys, wether he knows it or not.  He thinks that he is a Moonlight Child, like the 8 year old kid Liu Jinghui.  A hundred years earlier, a dude Fa Quan figured it was time to take out the Man because Jinghui was transforming into snakes and pheasants.  I shit you not!  Mutherfucking snakes and motherfucking pheasants, since they had no planes back then.  

And what does a Moonchild have to do with Lord Farquaad?  Apparently, Farquaad wasn’t rounding up characters for nothng.  When he found Fiona, he initiated her into the Mile High Club, thus requiring Samuel L. Jackson to throw down on their spawn, the young Jinghui.

Nevermind me, I’m doing an impromptu fiction mashup here.

How do we know these thousands of people were killed because of ol’ Mani?  Dualism, that’s how.  It’s like distributing guns in a Lord of the Flies scenario.  It is dangerous in the wrong hands.  You think I’m crazy?

I rest my case.

The most useful tools are always the most exploited resources.  Don’t tell me I am full of shit on this one or I’ll shove a Google News search down your throat.  Whoops, I just went dualist on your ass.  Sorry.

Song figured he was Maitreya.  But wielding the sword of dualism, he ended up cutting the throats of everyone who believed in him.  Ain’t it funny how things boomerang and hit you in the ass?  

Only if you believe that your ass exists outside of your own head.