O wonder! How many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, That has such people in't.
— William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206
Here I am, baking in Tesuque, New Mexico, trying to become a beam of light so that I might jet across the galaxies. Ultimately, to be bent and absorbed into a black hole, destination unknown.
Ah yes, all those distant stars. Memories really. Their light sent here ages ago. Their physical bodies, perhaps, already blasted to dust.
All those stars, millions of golden cicadas stuck up there like the shrike sticks them on the spikes of a flowering Cane Cholla. Speaking of which…
Everything out here, saints, sinners, new age prophets, dysfunctional leaders of communes, native people violently overtaken and subjugated, everything! It is all held together by glistening scotch tape.
A cheap promise of salvation from sin or desire or destruction which leads to so many into enchanting voids.
The web of life is scorched daily, bubbling brown earth relentlessly reflects all encompassing light. A memory really. In the mountains a fire rages and threatens to eat us all up.
Night rolls in, trail weary and a stinking-sticky-sweet blue.
I gather up my lights as if I am headed to a late shift in the mines.
After-all, there are treasures in this land.
Spirits too, memories really, for the fires are not the only primordial creatures of energy who are hoping to feast.
Are you at all surprised to hear me say it?
I hope to indulge them.
Not out of any drive to death, but because I desperately want to witness a miracle.
I want to be explicitly shown that being endowed with the peaks and valleys of consciousness has a purpose.
The spirits don’t come.
They either find me unappetizing or have been alienated from this land by the amnesia that comes with a consumer civilization.
I am left alone to play with light.
Purpose, it would seem, is a self derived gold/goal/ghoul.
The sun will burn itself until it collapses and engulfs the entire system that spins around it.
I am reminded of the mind boggling ratio that the moon shares with the sun.
The sun's diameter is about 400 times larger than that of the moon – and the sun is also about 400 times farther from Earth. So the sun and moon appear nearly the same size as seen from Earth.
What are the odds? Astronomical.
Here is where faith is wrought. In the inexplicable awe and mystery of being, far too complicated for one primate brain to grasp.
The more I ask the perennial question, “who and what am I?” the further from an answer I feel.
But then again, I prefer questions over answers.
See you next week,
-niki
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