Well, anyway

The rope is a nice diversion.  Anything is, really.  Usually it is the computer, and its multifarious machinations, that provide me with diversion.  Check e-mail.  What’s up on twitter? Check the bank balance.  And PayPal, too.  Search for a Chrome browser extension to enable auto-filling of password fields; I just switched from Firefox to Chrome and am still annoyed by some of their differences.  How about a bookmark extension? And I am almost out of disk space, so I need to find a way to re-compress a bunch of .avi files.  As cheap as hard drives are, I can’t afford to buy ice cream, much less a two-terabyte hard drive.  And flickr, it has about 22 million diversions per minute, I have to check there. 

And when all that is not enough (which has been the case for about two weeks) then only the rope suffices. 

Its image, its texture, its scent, its feel…  I roll in it, caress it, breathe it into myself, rub and embrace it, taste it.  Figuratively, of course.  I never actually touch the rope when I am so focussed on what it represents.  To do so would be to repudiate it when I eventually have to put it away.  Unless, of course, I use it.  And I don’t want to do either.  It is my catnip; certainly not an addiction, but definitely an irresistible diversion from time to time. 

I remember a lot the activities of a more youthful body; an inevitable symptom of age.  I don’t dwell on them.  Well, I do dwell on them occasionally, but for the most part I just observe.  Sometimes I fear that something absolute has been lost, that I am only now realizing that at some moment long ago the root of joy was irrevocably severed from my life.  But really I know; many other things have been cut off, but not that.  I have always substituted something in the place of joy of course–sex, athleticism, camping, skiing, mountain-biking, shopping–because joy is too imperative, it brings with it all the rest of reality.  And reality can only be controlled by exclusion.  And control, for some reason, is the be-all and end-all of my existence.  Who the fuck taught me that?

In the end, we are buoyed on a sea of joy.  It rolls and rises in dimensions beyond our senses.  The properties of that sea are not like those of any sea we have ever known.  Nothing sinks.  Nothing drowns.  Even if drowning in a familiar sea, we are yet uplifted by that greater sea, supported and caressed in ways which all comparisons–even this one–fail to apprehend.  And we cannot be divided from it.  It is the fluid of our origins, from which we can never be expelled, as so it seemed at birth.  It is the juice of life, and its gushing abundance lifts and maintains your life even as you read this word. 

In such a sea, can there be anything but “yes”, a universal, absolute, exultant affirmation? Isn’t any artificial self not made mute before this truth, not also false? Whatever we think we are, whatever we think is right or wrong, and no matter what else there may be within our limited consciousnesses, the source and the solution, the final link connecting all the loops and diversions back to the beginning is this thing that cannot be named, is not known to us, and can only be roughly perceived by us as joy.  And contained within such a “yes”, can there exist a “no”? Can any part of the universal whole exclude itself, and thereby make the whole now incomplete?

Such a “no” is like a boulder stuck in a swiftly moving mountain stream, it cannot impede its flow, but only creates a slight diversion and a brief turbulence which is quickly forgiven by the sparkling flow.  And if this metaphor were perfect, the stream would eventually cease to be water, and the boulder would eventually cease to be stone, and they would both become the wholeness that includes all streams and boulders, includes all seas and all sand, and includes all “no’s”. 

I hope this didn’t make any sense at all.  And now I am hungry.  Bye.