Dandy

When it comes time to dream, or even relax so deeply that the image in your mind defines your existence instead of vice-versa, I often think of big fields with waist-high weeds.

Not the kind of field with bugs or anything.  The sun lingers in the air while the sky steadily turns a dusty pink.
And you whisper in my ears with the light brush of the weeds in the wind.
Cattails mock your stride as you pass them.  Waving you brief farewells that fade before you turn to see.  The grass welcomes me in its embrace as I lie there, tickling my cheek and whispering youthful adventures to me.
A hill with a lone dandelion stands ahead.  You stoop to smell it and it kisses your cheek goodbye before you roll yourself down the other side.

And in the voice you hear how two become one.

The young philosopher pondered on the significance of oneness and realized it isn’t important.  He instead envisioned the wholeness of being, but realized he is only one.

What is the purpose of us all?  he’d ask.  If I can only listen to and believe that the world didn’t blink into existence at my very birth, then I’ve already been asked for faith.  What tools can I use to prove against this unless I use a tool that was already at my disposal?  How can I invent something to measure that life is indeed older than I am if I cannot trust I didn’t steal the idea from something I had already seen?  Faith answers these questions for him.  It turns out he didn’t know what these questions were until he pretended his faith didn’t exist.

Time appears to be an invention of man.  Its function is to prevent all of history from happening all at once, and is a mere bookmark between the covers of all of the universe.  Somewhere along the spine of it all, the present is wedged and the slightest touch bends the pages slightly further apart.  So those times where we sit and stare at each other’s eyes, something outside of the whole story book pushes down on the bookmark.  In that moment, five seconds becomes an eternity.  The distance between the pages is immeasurably close, and the fear of it all is calmed by faith again.  I don’t want this moment to end, I finger for a future just out of reach, but only because I know I can’t stay here forever.  Is this love?

The book is immensely huge and I am but a speck of ink that changes from page to page and eventually will be gone.  My story, even if most crucial, is insignificant in the tale this universe tells.  I am weak and narrow-minded.  I have tunnel vision.  I see life as a funnel of events, culminating in my existence.  I pretend that my actions have an impact on the rest of history.  I pretend that I am the sand that is always in the center of the hourglass.  The magic of life itself creates this lie for me… not my arrogance.  We feel this independently of calculated thought.  From the outside looking in, an eye would see a cylinder with tiny grains falling down.  Light would catch and reflect in this eye from a specific point. As it stares, the whole process seems to slow down, yet gravity here is immutable.  Is it rational to believe that a series of specific coincidences yielded my birth but none of my actions change the course of the future?

Imagine the perspective of a grain of sand in an hourglass.  This is the way I see it:
Without explanation I fall slowly down.  I see the choke far ahead and spin backwards to see my origin.  It extends limitlessly in all directions with a ceiling growing ever distant.  I crash into the center abruptly.  I twist and turn back forward to see the world ahead of me.  It extends limitlessly in every direction and gets smaller with every moment.

I miss the center.  This is where we were all forced together and tumble over one another.  Sometimes we lose a friend in the mix, and they roll along another time.  I give an envious pity to those that fall down the exact center; barely hesitating as they land in the funnel and spill out the other side before they can even identify their surroundings.  One dimension I cannot understand is that of all the wall flowers;  those who are stuck in a perilous journey with their faces pressed against the glass that looks out into a world of nothingness.  Their pace gruels along the edge until an abrupt propulsion launches them out the other end.  To them, this isn’t an hourglass at all… just a crowded slide with a bump at the end.

The greatest gift of life is that we are given everything.  When we ask “what happens when we die?” we think about the sight of darkness, or the sensation of cold nothingness.  That’s the point.  Our entire perception of life and living does not prepare us to comprehend death.  Life is everything we lose at the moment of death, there is no sight, no sensation, no thought.  Just a world without that last breathing soul that was you.  Life is everything you do to alter the rate of its passage.  If you stop to smell the roses, then you will actually cheat yourself into a longer life.  Because you stop for life, life will stop for you.  (E.D. – Because I could not stop for death…).

So the young philosopher thought, because he wanted to find a meaning for it all.  He discovered that life is made of a series of moments, that happen one after another.  Sometimes when we’re having fun time passes too readily, and even in tragedy time seems to stop.  Life isn’t for an eternal sunshine.  In my life, I want to pay back tenfold every happy moment life has given me where there was an hour between my heartbeats, or an inch between two.  I fight for tolerance and against destruction.  I long for equality and loathe empty discrimination.  I am a humanist and have to face a lie every day…

Where do the warriors go when the wars have all but ended?