Thursday, August 15, 2013

Killed by beauty

I, as a pinpoint of awareness in all of this infinite shmagaluphness, am walking at night with the whole of existence all around me, in every direction, everywhere.  It's night, or what I observe as night.  I am this thing which absorbs the ceaseless input of information from just... everything, is all.  I direct my sight up, and see a thing which astounds me.  Just flat out blows me away.  It always does, I guess.  Clouds are forming a bright fish-bone type of pattern against a darker background of sky... and the reason is - get this - because of the moon, which is half full.  It's over to the left of where I'm looking; where I'm directing my information absorbing attention, for those brief moments of eternity.  The clouds are a kind of gray-blue color, against another gray-blue color.  The sky.  Which is about, oh say... a hundred times darker than the clouds.  Wild guess.  They show up pretty well against it.  The moon is there, about a thousand times brighter than the clouds.  Half of it.  The moon.  Half of the moon, as it's only half full.  And there's this thing around it, a band of dim colors that fade into the background of sky, because of quadzillions of atoms what are scattering the light just so... red and blue and purple, and purple-black, and red-black, and blue-silver, and just so many colors.  I never have noticed before that so many colors can exist between gray blue black and white blue light.  I never knew that before. 

I continue walking, and the stuff around me continues to change as my position changes.  All kinds of stuff.  Lit by moon-light and man-light.  Trees, branches, leaves, man-made stuff, dirt, puddles of water, reflections of trees and branches and leaves and man-made stuff and dirt in the puddles of water.  For a few moments I wonder about the resolution of the universe, and how far down it goes, and how much processing power it takes to continue rendering it into existence, and then I imagine the mind of God, or try to... the mind of God, constantly rendering the universe into existence, and I am afraid, deeply afraid that I'm incapable of ever understanding, and that I'll be afraid for a brief piece of eternity.

Awareness continues and changes as the scenery changes, and the mood changes too, and I understand for a second... I am aware of how it's all attacking me from everywhere at once, all of this beauty, and that it's relentless, and without mercy.  It will never stop being beautiful, and my only defense is to ignore it, which is impossible.  I am being battered with beauty, and I start to cry, and to weep, and tears pour out of my eye holes, but I try to do it silently so as to not contaminate or offend or anger all of that everythingness around me.  I try to weep with a tiny bit of humility, but I know I'm not.  I know that I'm only weeping for myself, and because of my fear, but I don't know how else to be.  I don't know how to weep purely. 

I endure this kind of strange mixture of heaven and hell for as long as it takes for me to realize that this beauty is terminal.  It's killing me.  I'm being constantly killed by beauty, and I don't know if I'm crying with tears of joy or tears of sadness.  I don't know whether to be comforted or terrified.  I truly don't know.  I'm just overwhelmingly overcome with this thing, a feeling or something.  This thing that invades my now-ness and forces my acknowledgement of it.  I'm suddenly aware that I'm alive, so very much alive.  Ah, God.  I don't know.  I don't know what sadness is or happiness is.  I don't know.  I'm feeling very very much, and I don't know.  I'm aware of dying.  That I'm living, and that every moment of living is dying.  That the point of living is dying, and that the reason to live is to die.  To be killed by the experience of life; the beauty of it.  Beauty is killing me, and it always has been, and I only notice it now and then.  It's too much.