I am waiting. I am the waiting room. Part being, part place, part space. One plane, the Familial shoreline Another, the Cultural sky Last and first, the ghost of Time All, vertices of my Mind. Carried by Body Born from Sun then Earth Stirred by Moon All held in the Cosmic sea Quantum I am a Threshold, Where worlds live, die, live again A bubble. In bubbles. In bubbles.
It’s been over a year since I took a collection of thoughts and put them to words. This post has sputter-started-stalled over the course of months.
There’s been distractions. It’s a wild time to be alive.
We are living through a collective disruption of perception. Crisis abounds. The needle measuring every ideological facet of Civilization as We Know It is pegged. The control board is sparking smoke. The Winners are scrambling, acrobatically scheming, to keep the flow of power into their hands despite consequence’s feedback. It’s all unfolding as part joke, part nightmare, part revelation, part folly, part idiocy.
It’s a cognition shitshow.
So, when I read the above screenshot on Twitter, I laughed in devastated recognition. Because everything, everything, - e v e r y t h i n g - is metaphor. To be clear, I don’t mean forced metaphor. I don’t mean applied metaphor. I mean existence is sticky and reflective. It twirls and whirls around us and through us. There’s no escape. It’s all applicable, all relational.
It’s crushing into my nose, staring me right in the pupils, screaming: “LOOK AT ME I’M YOU GOO GOO G’JOOB.”
This also means I joined Twitter. Again. As of May, it’s been one year. I told myself a story that there’s many writers/publishers on Twitter and so I joined for *WRITER REASONS* (one of the double-edged truths about the power of narrative is that it often manifests as an astounding level of complete bullshit).
Damn me and the Infinite Scroll. Aiming for something closer to truth, I may be in love with being in a constant state of conflict. That and I’m scared and lonely and insecure and constantly hungry for dopamine. Thanks for hacking my brain, Silicon Valley.
I’ve started the process of deleting Twitter (again!) because there’s absolutely a corollary between my opening an account and lack of writing.
I promise this preramble is connected to the arc of this essay and other works in progress. It may read like I have some special insight or knowledge. I do not. I hold no position of authority. I’m not well read. I own no bestowed credentials of academic achievement. I have not amassed an entrepreneurial fortune. I was not born into wealth. I’m not a member of the halls of fame.
If constructs of legitimacy are your guiding light, be forewarned: I’m a just one of the gutterfolk, remembering my sense of awe and wonder.
It’s all been said, and continually being re-said by others more principled and perceptive and prescient and practiced—a fact that is simultaneously one of delight and despair. All the centuries of all the voices pleading and beckoning and warning…all the books and essays and reports and studies and speeches and poems and songs and comedic critiques…why do we still sprint lockstep towards the cliff’s edge?
In this darkness is a desperation for hope…but I caution you: Hope and Pessimism are conjoined chapters in the deliriously dysfunctional story we’ve all been born within.
It’s High Foolery to wrestle with the mad multiplicity of it all, but this is the cursed discipline of my ham-handed alchemy. The process is the path is the purpose is the plan. It’s part rebellion, part synthesis, part remix—where the real and imagined are echoes of an unfathomable vastness.
Nevertheless, let me try to explain:
EVERYTHING
Everything we believe, everything we’ve achieved and built, collectively, individually, is connected to a dizzying depth of interrelation. If you bother thinking about it, you will be disturbed. Why? Because the understanding of agency is shattered.
What changes? Context. Worldviews are born and perish in the flux of its presence.
Did you enter the world fully formed, with your present skills and perceptions and beliefs? What about your country of origin? Your religion? What about science? Economic and political theory? Did the Earth make itself? Our moon and sun?
One way to think about this is through a process of elimination:
Who would you be without your particular parents? Who would you be without the sense of sight? Hearing? Who would you be without modern medicine? What would America be without slavery? What would civilization be without petroleum? What would the planet be without a magnetosphere?
The posable questions are unending. Do you see how the island of individuality dissolves, especially America’s absurd meme of “rugged individualism”? Self-madeness dies and rots on the vine. Insular existence and intention cannot be maintained. There’s way more luck and circumstance and influence at play than we want to admit.
We are shaped long before we boast to be shapers. We work as we are worked upon.
My current model of understanding is that Free Will exists, but subject to the gravity of greater forces (more on that later). Yes, this is very arguable. No, you likely haven’t thought about it deeply enough. Even the best of us who are thinking about it vigorously are struggling. The quest gets existential quick.
I began as a caterpillar existentialist by almost dying multiple times between 1986 and 1990. Almost dying is as intimate one can become with Death without eloping. In all ways except dying, it is worse. You are likely to lose permanent parts of your body. There’s literal blood and guts. The choral symphony that creates “you” dissolves. And then slowly, painfully, terrifyingly, you are born again.
For someone in their late teens, it was a hell of a rite of passage. I don’t recommend it.
But if being alive is about experiencing as much as you can without dying, or before dying, I guess I was granted a strange boon: the exploration of a land that deep instinct shuns. I got to roam in the No Go Zone and come back to tell the tale.
It’s a weird gift. What do you do with it? Secular concepts of value and utility don’t stick. Like grief, it’s something you commune with well past the causal events—unexpected rememberings and visitations…shadowy companions for the rest of your days.
Fresh after dancing with non-existence, I was eager to embrace “normality” and began pursuing it with gusto. The next two decades were all about mindless ambition and accumulation. There were cars and houses and pay raises and promotions. Progress!
Despite these civilized metrics of resolve and achievement, it still did not go well.
Consequences of personal and collective origins found the bullshit-cracks in my foundation of thought. Incrementally, losses ate away at the pages of reason I’d read out of the world-wide best-selling book: Following the Rules.
In reaction, the 2010’s were my personal intention chrysalis-crucible… I ended my marriage. I quit my “career” of 25 years. I sold my home and cashed out my paltry blue-collared 401k. Many thought this was foolish. So did I. There was much fumbling. Tails chased. Time burned.
It’s hard to find grace when you realize the life you’ve pursued is a shallow mirage.
Now the 2020’s have arrived and, good lord, my intention is unveiled as pure comedy. The idea of seeking personal growth and truth has turned into a conflagration: I’ve emerged within a greater chrysalis-crucible with the other 8 billion of you.
It wasn’t just me. It’s all of us.
Everything has gone to goo. This liminal state of unknowing, unbeing, undoing, is hard to capture in words. But we are all here, so one way or another, you know too.
As our collective expectations and agreements and routines and beliefs and structures and processes and traditions dissociate, all that’s left is a boundless state of query: Who are we? Where is our place? What is our purpose? What is “purpose”? How much of our will was/is responsible for our present state?
Wisdom’s invitation is time + pain. Conflict is the call. Failure is the warning. Crisis is the portal. How we choose to relate to these heralds decides the message and destination. Maybe they lead to new paths of understanding and meaning, maybe we continue to swallow our tails in a feedback loop of indoctrinated patterns of behavior.
It’s a thriller. And if we are to heed the menagerie of compounding revelations that pummel us daily, it begs the question: are we capable of a course correction or did we already blunder over some primal threshold and bound ourselves to a particular arc of…fate?
Civilization (as practiced) has conquered and holds captive nearly all of humanity. It’s reared us to think of our lives as individual, autonomous. Collectively, we’re positioned as unique. Advanced.
Religion claims life is but an elaborate waiting room, that the Earth was created for us to subdue and rule, that we have eternal “souls” and exclusive divine significance. Modernity claims we have a singularly special level of destiny-crafting intelligence/consciousness that sets us above and outside all other life, that the Earth and beyond is a resource of materials and energies to consume and define and categorize and valuate and harness and manipulate in the ceaseless pursuit of growth.
Both stories tells us we are exceptional. Alone.
Regardless, see how our self-definition is one of severance and alienation? Do you see how we avoid association and responsibility just for a fleeting feeling of superiority, of mastery? Do you see how this turns living into perpetual conflict and occupation?
We are guided by stories of force and domination. We live in opposition. We’ve imagined and built a bubble of tortuous fancy and told ourselves that it is reality.
It’s a deeply embedded pattern of identity and meaning that is constantly divorcing itself from the real inter-layered eddies of emergence and reverberation and reciprocity and dependence that make being human even a possibility.
Whether as a person or a family or a nation or a species, it’s impossible to separate ourselves from Everything. If we’re truly interested in understanding who we are and how we came to be our present-selves with all its blesses and curses, we will begin by acknowledging and respecting our enmeshment.
Because life, existence, is way wider and weirder than we allow ourselves to see.
Thanks for reading. Next up: Greater Forces.
It seems like I’m perpetually Beginning to Begin, but the plan is to write and post once a week. I’m building something…but I’m not sure what. Maybe it’s many things, my Everything Burrito, if you will. If I can maintain a schedule for a couple of months that’ll mean I’ve got the engine running and I’ll open up the option for paid subscriptions. All content here will always be free, but if you want to support my wayward endeavors with dollar bills, you’ll have a way.
More importantly, if you like what you read, please share. Humans need humans to make things happen. Our connections and collaborations are where possibility lives.