Limbo: Removal from the Equation
I listened in tonight, and this is what I heard…
Q: God, I’m so confused. My mom says she’s tired all the time, but still she takes sleeping pills every night and sometimes in the afternoons too. My big sister is so worried about what people think about her. I hear what she does to herself. My brother changes moods every time he takes a step, he’s either depressed or angry. I don’t think my daddy love’s my brother very much. He doesn’t like to touch anybody, not even mommy. And every time I watch TV the commercials tell me there’s another disorder out there I have to watch out for. I’m so confused I want to cry. Everything seems so wrong. Is there something wrong with me too?
A: Immersed in sickness, it is difficult not to become sick oneself. If you remain strong, little one, you will grow deep, healthy roots.
* * * * *
Flee! the inner voice spoke, in a distinct and very primitive manner.
So I fled.
At the root of it all, it was a feeling of sickness, of deep disease manifested in the form of agitation, confusion. The question wasn’t as to whether up was down or vice versa, but instead whether a distinction could truly exist. And what was I? Body, mind, animal? Where did I stand in the mix of humanity? The cosmos?
It was the height, the Renaissance of indecision, and I was the premier artist of the day.
Had the episode done no more than anger me I would’ve fared well enough. Anger is a thing one can grasp, an emotion to further define a moment. But it wasn’t simple anger that I felt and I wasn’t just fine. I had never known emotion like this.
I needed change. I needed purity.
In with the good, out with the bad. A selective binging and purging.
In need of flexibility, I broke down and found the dream.
Which was more of a dream within a dream.
My mind swam deep within itself, ignorant of the physical realm. From the dream depths I swam deeper within. Memories, theories and beliefs flitted by in schools, grouped by emotion, caught the occasional ray of sunlight on their glinting silver bodies as they rolled and darted with perfect synchronicity. Faces I loved shimmered in those reflections, reminders of the ever-present past and future.
I swam on, deeper still, to a place where survival became difficult. The cold of the waters shocked my system into the easy recognition of what was necessity and what was not. It was a nearness to death that removed the clutter of life. It was a reverie squared to the power of a revelation. It was the ultimate lesson, the strangeness coming together with the forms of time and self. I found that if I imagined time as a room, a field, any three-dimensional plane, I could walk around in it.
Like reaching for nirvana I aspired to the calm. Blinding light filled my mind, sparks searing unopened eyes bright enough to dwarf a supernova. I grasped at consciousness through the thunder and lightning associated with creation-and found myself at the beach.
It was a place with which I was familiar, a place visited before in dreams. I sat cross-legged on white sand, a log cabin behind me, the epitome of buena vista unraveling before my eyes.
Sapphire water unnaturally bright crashed gently down on the sand. Further out, the sun shattered itself into thousands, millions, an eternity of shards, progeny glimmering like the father. A tightly clustered archipelago of four densely forested islands no more than a mile in diameter drifted just out of reach. They lay a mile apart, one equidistant from the next, but it seemed to me that they were stones in a creek and I could hop from one to the other, had I bothered to stand up to make the effort.
Toes buried in warm sand, I was alone but not lonely. All was perfect serenity under a blue sky. Light filled my eyes as water would a gourd, to and past the point of brimming until it seemed as though the light attempted to insure that my eyes would remain open and alight forever.
Then came the torrent. Lucidity, like oxygen to life, washed over me, replayed the growth of my consciousness.
I was a child, and always had been. Memories brought back the belief that I could see air-my brother never believed and told me so-when I lay in bed, staring in the dark at the underside of the upper bunk, an innocent of four years. Waiting for sleep to come in the apartment in rainy Washington, the air sparkled, each particle scintillating. It was the kind of thing that made you cock your head to one side, wide-eyed with wonder. I was curious and wise, without knowing it, all at once. I knew peace, without knowing what peace was, in this beautiful world.
And then I found myself on a ferry headed for Whidbey Island. Still young enough not to care about the gentle rain drizzling down around my head, I stood on the upper deck, face jutting into the wind. A flat grayness stretched far over my head, blanketing the earth from horizon to horizon. It wasn’t a thing I recognized as depressing, it simply was, and I was happy for it.
Over the railing and down, the painted white hull of the ferry cut into green-black water, throwing it up and out in a spray of white. My grandpa and brother joined me along the railing, all of us equally silent. Beneath a solemn sky, it seemed right to have nothing more than the roar of wind and the hiss of water falling on water in my ears.
The house on the island stood directly on the beach. Each day my brother, two cousins-the same age as my brother and I-and I would walk out with the tide, for what seemed like miles, until we could see nothing but wet sand and sky. It was a place where we had never been before and each day imagination allowed us to be discoverers and explorers of a new world. Below us the sand, soft and saturated with water, melded to the forms of our feet as we treaded onward, clad in t-shirts and shorts all, in search of a relatively dry sandbar. Above us clouds ripped apart as the hours went by to reveal an underbelly of bright blue, tinny sunshine radiating from a high, lonely sun.
We played all day, making forts on raised sandbars, fortifying them and ourselves against the inevitable insurgence of tide. Knees, hands and feet in the wet sand, I silently urged the clouds to move along quickly as they blocked out the sun, goose-pimples standing out on my tight skin and a corona of gray ablaze behind the translucent skin of the clouds.
At night we collected driftwood up and down the beach, bare feet hardened by coarse sand and jagged, broken shells. The fire etched marks in our faces that, in its absence, the sun had forgotten to make. We charred marshmallows and held our makeshift torches high into the night sky, running and stomping carelessly, kicking sand and burning our fingers each and every night.
Later, when it came time to sleep, we headed down to the basement and climbed in bunk beds, telling scary stories by flashlight. In that same flashlight we gazed longingly at the ceiling where a poster of Shelley Long was pinned up, knowing for the first time the deep ache that was unrequited love.
Eventually the stories would fade away, as would consciousness, and we awoke to gray light sneaking in through clamped blinds, Shelley Long on the ceiling, staring back down at us yet again, and a whole new day with nothing and everything to do.
And the reminder of childhood brought with it the most recent memory of childhood lost. The experience hadn’t been mine, but I felt the enormity of it all the same.
I saw it all again, their breakdown on a loop, playing over and over on the screens behind my shut eyelids, standing straight and tense, like trees, saplings screaming for someone to uproot and move them, for someone to change their fate. I dreamt I was connected to them, through empathy and time. Inexorable time that molded us out of the same pain-the history of culture.
Siamese twins us anxious kids, like constellations, the lines between us invisible. Yet imagined, those lines created a picture. We were the same, bruised children, weak stars wanting strength, twinkling out in the void, part of a beautiful whole.
And the realization came that despite being the age of a man, I still felt the child. Knowledge, or at least faint inklings of truth, had done nothing to push me along in the way of decision. Or had it been that a decision to do and be other than the accepted meant a limited amount of options, in which I had yet to partake? It still amounted to indecision. I had few answers and many questions. One stood out as the most important-What could possess a person to push cruel measure on not only fellow man, but all things living?
Disease. Ignorance.
Cross-legged on the beach, my eyes snapped open to stars. Night had come in this place that existed nowhere but my mind, and I couldn’t help but think of my sad friend Michael.
Abused with lack of love, the only remedy he knew was loneliness.
SELFISH PARENTS BEGET LONELY, LOVELESS CHILD, PAIN ENSUES seemed to be the headline of the times. In the name of time, or ease, parenting had been left up to television, to drugs-both legal and illegal-to teachers-some competent, some incompetent-to nobody. The mothers and fathers of America, the workers, the businessmen and women, the believers of the system, refused to look within, refused to admit that the human is a creature mainly of the learning facility. Thus, unwittingly, the diseased mode of living, covered over in the name of culture, of modern civilization, rolled ever on and downward in a landslide, callous as to whose bones and spirit it crushed.
Platonic forms and truths scrolled through my head, coupling themselves to the stars, not in word form, but in the invisible spaces of action. These were the things I had always known, as plain as the visible universe, only made difficult to see with so many walls obstructing vision, so many words to deceive and taint meaning.
Forms and truths coalesced from something intangible to something physical, floating out there in the sea of blackness above my head, clustering together to form a core of energy, a star whose light touched on all things living. I sat and stared, drank in the light, watched as it grew in intensity, in heat, became the central force of my universe, to which I gravitated. Dwarfing all else, bright enough to blot out the sun in a daytime sky, I touched that light, felt its being laced, just as radio waves with information, with the latent knowledge of the things that had always been, the things patterned after a path of understanding. I felt what it meant to discard worry, what it meant to truly live.
Far away, we here on earth had yet to discover this light, this heat. Only in dreams did it transgress physical law. In the dream within a dream, this knowledge penetrated the consciousness of my internal sabbatical.
I sat with rigid poise immersed in paradise, sand warm beneath my body. No movement of muscle betrayed the battle raging in my head, my soul. The light met with the learning, wielding a declaration of war of its own, and ferreted out the bigots, traitors, and gluttons for power, nose attuned to the fear.
They collided, clashed in my head-a stupid, weak, one-legged festering monster of media shot bullets at its intangible opponent, the truth incapable of being touched or held, only feel the warmth of in your skin, bones, and deeper still, until it penetrated the soul.
But it was more than just gamma rays that unzipped the nucleotides of disease. Knowledge of my better self radiated throughout, coursed through my veins and squeezed through capillaries, infused my blood with silent fortification of self. Lines of that better picture, lines infused with the light, adhered to bone and muscle, was exercised, shone through to the surface with the decision and action to live and act as a force of personal evolution.
The one remaining question-Why and for what did we find ourselves fighting?-had been answered.
Out of all those religions preaching asceticism and seeking salvation upon death, none seemed to realize the magic and strength of life. This was the sharp point of my revelation-Each and every breath was meant to be a prayer, a burning of molecules, a new creation every second, a tribute to light, water, and dust. An infinite number of lightning strikes within the cellular spaces, an atomic detonation each second pulsing, exploding throughout my body.
Energy rose to the surface, to my skin, learning this lesson from the sun.
I also rose, through the waters of unconsciousness, to claim a new form of consciousness in a persistent awareness of the life and potential energy surrounding me at all times.
Unafraid to exhale the last breath, the departing word of death, I opened my eyes and drank in the first sweet breath and light of life renewed.
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