STARMUD AND MOONWATER NINE

STARMUD AND MOONWATER NINE

 

              The moment you say you hate your life you make an object of it. Something outside yourself. You reify it. You make it a thing. It’s the same when you say you love it. You make it an enemy or friend. Either way you’re on the receiving end of something else’s powers. But life isn’t something from the outside that happens to you like a rock through a window or a fifty dollar bill at your feet. That happening is you. Life is you and you are the whole of life out to the furthest star you’ve ever wished you were someone else upon. It’s like trying to take the light out of the water when the sun is shining. It’s like trying to separate the moon’s reflection from the lake. It’s like trying to separate the sea from its weather or space from time. Or a thought from a mind. If your life happens to a self as you assume it does then does the seeing happen to your eyes, the hearing to your ears, the tasting to your tongue, the touching to your fingertips? Does the saying happen to your voice? Show me an outside that isn’t experienced within. That is always This. Mind is the habitable environment in which you exist. To the fish its water. To the bird its sky. You can tell there’s life in the water. That water lives. Life in the sky. That the sky’s alive. By the way they swim and fly. It’s the same with you and the world. You and everything. Phenomena are noumena. The container is the content of the mind. The cup is the wine. Because you can’t pour the universe out of the universe or into it. Everything’s as full as it is empty all the time. Tat tvam asi. You are that. So what’s to accept or resist? You can open your hand or you can make a fist for or against yourself but it’s still the sound of one hand clapping in either case. You’re a wave out of water. You’re a mirage trying to overcome the delusion of being lost in a desert. You’re an abyss that’s sick of being empty. That bitches at This like a game of snakes and ladders in the apple tree of knowledge as you try to climb up out of the snakepit on an umbilical cord to heaven where you hang like a worm waiting for butterfly wings and rockers that are patched by angels. You love the lightning when it flowers with celestial powers but you still don’t know that the lightning is rooted in you. You don’t know how to sit beside your own mindstream until the wild irises have forgotten your name and not even your own reflection can tell the difference between the two of you when you’re not. That’s like saying it’s all one then working hard to make it so as if it weren’t. Or holding up placards like flowers for the reform of perfection. You’re trying to be clear and pure enough in your translucently stainless way to be happy but what’s pure about purity is that it doesn’t make the distinction. Its That never foul- mouths This by reeking of perfection in an abbatoir. The star doesn’t need to chase after its own light to see the way things are. The wound doesn’t go looking for a scar that heals

or turn one down because it doesn’t feel right.

              You tell me you’ve lost yourself. But that’s like saying the wind lost its way through the atmosphere or space got so lost in time it’s never going to find a way out of itself. You’re looking for yourself in the lost and found of your own mind. Your lighthouse with your lighthouse. Your firefly with your firefly. Your flashlight with your flashlight. The return address of your way home from inside your own windows and doors. The night doesn’t go looking for a north star to align itself with the darkness. The night encompasses everything without direction. That’s why the stars always know the time without consulting a calendar or clock. First light in this last hour of Is born of what it dies from without beginning or end.

              But if you really want to know where it’s at. Stop chasing blossoms for their sweet promises of fruit and get back down to the roots.  Forget these words as soon as you’ve heard them, like seeds in the fall, and see for yourself. You are not broken or flawed or lost because there are no weeds to be cast out in the garden of your own human divinity like a god with starmud on his gumboots who gives his name to the flowers, his name to the stars as if they were all his children. As they are. All yours before the arising of signs when there was no one there to claim or shame or blame them for being someone else.

 

PATRICK WHITE