the fate of the sun
There is only one breath.
There is only one thought.
There is only one emotion.
The one you are having now.
Your destiny is this moment. Your life, this moment.
If only we could hold this with us, always, as we went about the business of being. The undercurrent, the infinite depth, the only reality. You know it’s true. It is the truest thing. You are experiencing it now, forever, as we all are. There is no escaping it.
There is, to be sure, a running from it. A wobble forward, backward, sideways in time; the places we endlessly topple into, finding time and again the overbearing weight of the world leaning into us, telling us to care too hard, to work too long, to love with a wanting that tastes of tales that typify the experience of that time: lost. It is miraculous that we miss it. We tell ourselves that miracles don’t exist, yet go on missing the very miracle of the missing of our own lives. The irony is painful, sardonic, beautiful. It is life as we know it.
Yet we are coming to the end. It cannot go on as it has been. You know this. We all do. It has been terrible, and tragic, incomparable, ecstatic — dizzying in its display of endless expression, of perfect possibility. Childhood often is. But the growing pains are upon us. They are undeniable. We must wipe our eyes and turn to face the new day. We must stand tall and look into the sun. There we will find it. Everything. The past— reflection. The future— projection. Movies of the imagination. At best, adumbration. But it is killing us. Our disbelief has been suspended for so long our faces are turning blue. We need to breathe again. We need to reclaim our fates from the imaginary roles that have taken us, from those dreadful spectres devoutly deepening the lines in our skin with so-called facts built upon the fictions we so easily give in to.
Everyone knows not to play with ouija boards. We do not belong to the ghosts of our minds, no matter how much flesh and time we drape upon them. There is no fate but the one we are experiencing now. There is no life but for the one breath bated in the lung. And it is the same place in which we shape the fate we forever continue to experience. All of it, now.
So view the movies as they flit before your consciousness, but keep yourself the watcher at the stream. Allow the water its passage across your eyes, but do not deliver your body unto it. Baptism is a lie. Each of us were baptized in the blood of our mothers, as we came bawling into this world. No other is needed.
Do this, and you will keep the recognition of the greater tapestry alive, even as it unfurls before your eyes in patterns so majestic that all but the finest minds would find their breath tethered to it, their hearts heated by its furious passage. Do this, and you will come to remember that within the eyes of every other we find here — in the din and the madness of this life — lies the grandest secret: you and I are the same.
There is only one breath.
Image: Mops Tati