Goldenrodpink Morning & the Core of Unfathomable Beingness

I lay in bed last night and felt my mind slipping away from me. What happens after the destruction of the ego? Why did I pretend that I could return to life as it was before, rather than going forever and on into the future? In a soft and hot jungle of mind, I couldn't rest; I squirmed in the sheets.

Dawn came, and I got up and went out. At the road by the lake, the passing cars seemed unfathomably loud, and I wondered why there were so many at 4 am. I started on a private trail leading to the camps nearby, my feet breaking through the crest of snow. The day was dawning with stunning passion and alacrity. Someone else had walked this path before, and I stepped in their iced footprints. There, at the clearing, their footprints turned about, and I stepped onto the crust of snow. It held me as surely as it would a bird.

I walked across the snow to the shoreline, behind the dock that had been pulled up for the season. The island was visible from here, shot through with pink and gold. On my back, the sky above was an unfathomable blue, a color that has no known name or composition, dawn's own color. Static birch trees hung in the sky above me, their branches touching the flat bright-dark sky, and it reminded me-or it was-the dream I had had once of the place at the edge of the world, the eerie, still, manmade quality to the trees. I was affected--I felt in me the freshness of morning and the world and its utter lack of understanding for the hell and darkness I deigned myself fit to live in. Joy has no room for pain-- Joy is just joy and joy and joy forever, never understanding a purpose for stopping.

I got up and walked to the clearing again, spying the untouched snow in its center, and I knew I wanted to run to it and dance in it, but wondered if it would collapse under my weight. I thought about fear and how if I was to travel, really, and see the world, if I was to look at everything and anything, I must get used to operating without inertia and fear. I ran and my feet marred the crest of snow but it did not break in the least, and in the center I found myself in a spin, and I spun and spun and in a moment I fell down and then I got up again and I fell again.

And in that second, I experienced a shriek of joy, aloneness and aliveness, vibrating straight through my whole being and I was shaken clear out of my body and knew what I couldn't understand but it made me remember...

I walked out onto the ice despite its frosted wetness and the whole pond was lit up by pink and yellow, lit from north sky end to south sky end. I walked very slow and quiet. I knew that I hadn't really known anything right all of my life, and that all my struggling and suffering was for nothing, and I knew there was something I couldn't understand. I knew also that I'd come this close before to knowing it, and even farther too, and I couldn't understand it. I knew there must be more to it than the sentence blocked out in capitals in my mind: IT ISN'T LIKE THAT...(FOOL!) I talked up to the sky and laughed and cried that this was true and real and there and that humans lived in the shadow of the sun, that we suffered and struggled as did I, never able to grasp the unfathomable truth, that all we had to do was simply to love, and that there was no game and no winning of it, and there never had been...and how wrong I had been...

And that the truth was far more beautiful than we would guess. And I knelt and put my hands together and said, "Whatever this thing is, I can see it but I cannot taste it! Please, deliver it into my arms." And I walked off the ice and cried in an ironic way, wondering if our minds would ever be big enough to apprehend such majesty, and laughing because they wouldn't and it hardly mattered, and shaking a little in the knowledge that I was surely going to forget again before really remembering at all!


"Breaking open the sun on a fine young goldenrodpink morning
with pink traveler's suitcase words and saying:
yes, this is living, yes, this is dying, yes, yes yes."