At night. Sodium, flourescent, red, blue, bathing the normally mundane scenes in our day-to-day. New shadows, new glares. Every 20 m a bath of orange glow, like a miniature sunset on the undersides of hundreds of fan-shaped ginko leaves. I guess what I really like is the fact that the overbearing sun isn't shining. And the way the moon, as coy as ever, greets me some nights waiting and grinning just at my front door.
My existence baffles me. I know that to percieve or to believe mean nothing to it.... what is it? This existence, not this life, nor this story, nor the monotony that plagues worldliness.
At times I look in my mind at the sky, at the far side of the galaxy, or at some person crying on the other side of the world, or a morning glory blooming on some distant island sunrise. And I feel exactly like falling to my knees on the grass under the stars. I want to scream at the Everything, "Take me! Take me back!" As though if I desired it so completely, bared my chest where my heart ties soul to flesh, I would be heard. By god, or nirvana, the angels, or the dao, or by what free will and belief can muster. And disintegrate. Dissolve every last thought and breath and cell down below the quarks, and exist simultaneously, completely, with everything, everyplace, everytime, again. And I guess, "that's what 'god' must feel like." I know it. Everything is like a deja vu, a dream in that shadows that haunts though you can't quite recall, like a memory so long ago that only tattered fragments of scenes remain, but the feeling is as vivid as ever.
Other times, I relish in the absolute beauty of perception, sensuality, humanism. Like the giving of an honest smile, or a cool breeze laden with wet, or the sparkle on the wings of two dragonflies conjoined, skirting a sun beam, smoke curling from a wild blaze, or the moment of a toast with colleagues. I want to capture that exact moment of truth or beauty or brazen life, want to take hold and experience that exactly for as long as I can. As though, if I breathed deep enough, I could live forever in that moment along with all the other wonders. And I guess, "that's what 'death' must feel like." Wrapped in a series of instants, beautiful and terrible both, that comprise the roll of human life. And I know it, too. Know death like an old friend that remains beside you no matter how far away you are, like an old favorite song that you can't say why you can't get out of your head. I know I've died many times, and loved it.
I know I wouldn't have lived without it.
