The story thus far

After months of rain and sometimes snow, the skies cleared and opened into sun. The constant noise of falling wetness changed into a thousand birds and insects singing. Even the plants seemed to sound out their speedy growth under the sun. All these motions and waves lifted into the spacious blue canopy, and yet there was still room for hazy spring dreams.

I had at last returned home to the country after many years spent under an urban thrall. There had come a point that I identified myself as sick, but had no symptoms anyone recognized as anything other than “normal”. Seeing the doctors and therapists changed nothing except my certainty that I was unwell. I began to doubt my own veracity, then my own existence. Soon I had developed a full-blown anxiety disorder, apparently out of nowhere according to the health professionals. It was then I decided that I could no longer trust anyone but myself to discover and cure the source of my sickness.

I left the city, then, but it didn’t leave me. Trying to shake an awful emptiness, I flew from coast to coast, from country to country. The void hung tenaciously on. Eventually, I allowed myself to take some help and move in to a small house in the country. This self-imposed retreat was in fact not a retreat at all, but a return to reality. I began to see that the city was in fact not the centre of the universe, but only its periphery, a black hole on the edge of reality that desired to pull everything into it. In the middle of nowhere, I found the center of everything.

For years I had been trying to find out what my purpose was in life, what I was here to do. In the sound and silence of the forest, the trees told me the answer. What was their purpose? Certainly they did not exist to just provide oxygen for animals. I slowly became aware that I had learned in the city to take everything for granted. I assumed the entire world was aimed at humanity, either for or against us. My anthrocentricism reinforced my egocentricism, and so my sickness. Lying on my back in the sun and the dirt, I happily let go. Now there was only nature living and dying all around and in me.

autoerosanthropy

This is the perfect day to have as a lover.

All my charms

Everything in hand, house, car, career careening out into nothing. Everything accumulated like charms clasping tight links in the story of life. Never there, always half the distance to here even when well in hand. What’s well in hand when the hand comes off? All parts are detachable: life love money and all the rest. Just like charms held tight in links circling the fist, always just out of reach.
All parts parted ad infinitum. Every atom an object of desire. Every hand out of hand. Endless desire, endless charms, endless running, endless endlessness.

Remembering Newfoundland: Fluid Environment

Like fish in water, people generally overlook the fact that we live in a fluid environment. Unless, of course, it develops a current that we are forced to admit we swim in. 100 km/h winds definitely have more direction and force than the more buoyant regular air pressure we bob around in on average days. This wind is a tumultuous river compared to a calmer days’ walk in a lake. The rapidly passing atmosphere also creates a real feeling of how asphyxiation might occur out in the middle of all that air: what if you can only draw rarefied low-pressure air into your little lungs, or worse, the low-pressure feels like it’s sucking the air out of you. The environment breathes you, and pop! one less oxygen-sucker on the planet. Trees at high altitude hint at what high-pressure life would look like. Tall and spindly, it’s easy to see they are having a hard time sucking what they need out of the air. (Kinda like the high-pressure/low-nutrition world of supermodelling, although why and what they’re sucking is probably very different.) You’d think at the rate we cut them down and humiliate them with our fecal bathroom rituals we were competing for the same airy resources, but we aren’t.( From a tree-evolutionary perspective, in tree history, what kind of monsters are humans? We wreak their genocide, then mangle and mash the corpses into a paste which we dry and subsequently use to clean our very dirty orifices. What ring of hell does a tree go to for that, and for what sins, in tree lore?)
What would happen if everyone on the planet—everyone human, at the least—inhaled and exhaled at the same moment? Would we have to plan it, the breathing of the planet, or would it just come like the inevitable genius of the billionth typewriting monkey? Would the giant Morpho in the sky flap its wings and counteract that concerted contraction and expansion or would we be left on our own, sucking each other in then blowing each other away? I believe in the giant Morpho in the sky. And I believe in the flying spaghetti monster too, or I at least believe they could be mythical cognates of one another.
The water in the toilet waves every time the wind pushes against the house. Is the water staying plumb still with the rest of the house moving around it? Golly! In Newfoundland you get your sea legs on land!