Reality Maw

An ode to the possible impossible for the sometimes blind and hopeful. And a meditation on choice, death, and the sacred, from the jaws of reality. Echoes of a man's onward spiritual process.

To the ambiguous egg of clarity,

A funny way to begin crafting prayer in the costume of words, that. Such is the state of mournful courage that seeks the grace of a nameless sacred.

This is a meditation and it takes form in a prayer. The beginning has begun.

I am here because of a prescient energy to choose my way to die.

In more words, I am here in hope of discerning which way to die enables the use of my energy fully, in dedication to living well.

I notice I am a leaf with wings and friendly with the wind, and a seed fallen far from the tree.

I am member of an amnesic lineage with many scattered houses. And if their foundations be rock from the molten core, I know the seeds of their stately gardens to be kindred, and the leaves of their trees welcomed each by the winds of catastrophe and health.

The temples of men crumbled before me, but I harbour no ill will. And I am grateful for the light they’ve treated by the beauty of their stained glass windows. And I honour their dedication to arts of brightness and shadow.

But their altars of prayer are rubble for me, and the tolling of their bells do not summon me.

In my prayer tonight I am alone. With everything else. Which is yet a silent comfort. Witnessing, waiting.

And through our noisy channels even signal speaks in tongues. Where the privilege of voice, now hollow at the podium, parroting on your local FM, and schizophrenically refracted across the internet, has long since disconnected from its agency as pawn, in a war where masters are now the slaves, and the slaves aren't even playing.

But in the end it’s not so bad. Because soil makes use of all nutrients, even the shells; and we’ll see home again.

But who wants a death of frivolity? Riches only in irony?

How can I tread with sincerity on a baggage train of lack?

Am I cattle for the cause, hoping yet for pastures green, and my allotted blades of grass, to mint as NFTs?

This bio-techno-future, complicating nature, to prevent us from our natural response, to smarting tools we undeservingly wield, yet deservingly succumb to.

A fear of turning on the rack as culture creaks, elongating body, staving off the snap.

Cattle on racks, triumphantly bleating their deaths will somewhat more likely be by means they are too ignorant yet to know. That's on the one hand—statistical good opinion about a throttled context, oozing omens like nightmares in a trench. This marriage of Daddy 'Science', he with penchant for frequent affairs, and that frightful devouring mother—she who dolls out care like blood-thinners to a man being lashed.

On the other is a fear of dying on a hill absent friends, sacrifice met forlorn and abandoned, energy squandered, (save to the soil.) For there is time yet left on the rack of forgetfulness, to turn full circle and through our dismemberment find we need not gather all the pieces to share vision of the whole in its making.

And now the clearing.

Whichever route I take I see the values meld the same. I need not stand and die at all and have it be in vain. And if leaf I be with little wings, to buffet by the storm, there is no patch of hell on earth my tears are barred to mourn.

And so in mourning I search for my courage, for it presents a choice. The possible impossible, liberated voice.

What for to be a man, fixed to an oar, with his spirit on the wind?

Or a leaf with wings in a storm?

May seed yet find the soil.

Liberated soul.

—

Discernment on the Way,