Creation

“We have the marvelous gift of making everything insignificant.”
― Nikolai Gogol

 

I have been possessed by a writer's habit, which becomes increasingly preponderant in a life that takes its purpose in seeing and yet never possessing. To see is already to be part of something and its distance teaches us to value its immensity and its immeasurable scale. Gathered at the bottom of this vastness, just barely grasping those folds of space which cross over into out existence, we perceive it through the barest glimmer of light; that vast complexity which has given us the possibility of life, and the opportunity to unfold our future within ourselves, and through that mind that can choose to see either that everything is a miracle or that nothing is. 

 

It is a choice we are given, to either fear our own death or to not. At the expense of ourselves we choose not to destroy what we hate, for we see the insignificance of our limited space, and that this quarrel has no purpose. Life itself is not rendered absurd, but rather the perceived details which have not yet spanned outward. It is not life that is a disappointment, but what we understand of it. And it is perhaps because we do not blend with it; our skin is woven from the soil and everything ecstatic, every inch of color and depth has permeated our galaxy since its own birth. We are its children and merely see what it anciently has cultivated within itself. Its ancient life is a life that flummoxes our own tentative existence, so possibly vast and yet so precariously strung to that thread of possibility.

Our own existence is shared regardless of what we believe, and all suffering is passing. This permanent dusk where the shadows still remain, when the dust settles over cities, still visible in daylight. Some suffering is necessary for us to see ourselves as we really are. As T.S. Eliot says, we will only see ourselves as we are, for the first time, and that this journey is not about ends but about a beginning which we might be able to discern truth within. This story crackles and repeats like a dusty vinyl slowly spinning in the late afternoon, rain against the window and smoke drifting through the room. A light incense hovers and dispels that dampness felt on the forlorn walk home. A song is something that repeats itself until a new trill can be found. It cannot forever remain what it was.

As for me, there is no absolute. No universal that exists without something rising and falling. It is regenerative, and changes with the unfolding of time. As we depart from the limitation of the narrow, and towards a sea of change there no longer needed a certain vastness that once was. The familiarity of thought will be understood and the similarities will become more outwardly apparent. Language will become naturally more familiar as a confluence appears with it and the reality it serves to describe and designate. But these designations will take on more fluidity. Time itself will change.