Monday, May 5, 2014

The smell of the universe

Today I was feeling very depressed, all day long. I... for a little while, more than I usually am. Anyway. It was really busy today at work and I didn't get everything done that I wanted to, even though I stayed for an extra hour. I just felt overwhelmed with the regular workload I usually deal with, and gave up without a fuss at about 1 o'clock.

It's the see-through top layer of life, what we call real life, the conscious, awake part that seems important, which seeps into my pores and permeates my body with poison and dilutes my soul and spreads it thin. It seemed especially sticky today though, and I left the store fed up with how thick it felt... not wanting to be fed in any direction, or to be aware of any feeling which described the quagmire.

That's a good word for the thick, interminable stuck thing which occurs between sleeps... quagmire. Just looking at that word makes me feel like my tongue is going to tie up in knots and die trying to say it. It's the perfect word to describe what awakeness feels like to me most of the time.

And that's how I felt tonight, when I left the store. Stuck in the thickness of the quagmire, and just wanting to be out of it for a little while before bed. So I left work tonight, dissatisfied but relieved, and I turned off my brain except for the music part and the walking part, and the subconscious part that processes random craziness.

I had this crazy crazy crazy epiphany tonight, and I'm not sure if I can remember exactly what it was about, but I'll try to right now. It had to do with this music I was listening to, a British band called Doves. It's that rare type of music, which is made out of and resides at a certain level of good, that fools your awareness into noticing and recognizing a single moment, and then immediately taking that advantage to bludgeon it into that rare state of clarity and happiness. You know, that one.

So that's what happened tonight. The music pierced that vulnerable part of my facade which I always keep facing towards all physical phenomena, and I found my whole self being swept away, all of it. This is the point where all of that thing occurred. Should I try to describe all of that thing? Okay, I'll make a half assed go at it.

All that thing was a feeling of the present moment, and the music inside of it, with me mixed up in there somewhere, going on and on and on, but not even lasting an instant... Outside of time, I guess, is the only way to sort of bullshit my way around what that feeling means, because it's actually pretty much impossible to describe it.

Here's another way to describe what it wasn't not like - try to imagine actually being a song. That's what you are, a song. A piece of music. A whole bunch of notes, all existing together and making this sound which is beautiful, and that's what you are. But do you only exist whenever those notes are reverberating as waves through a medium? What is that song as it is being physically played? Does it still exist afterward? What is music anyway? What am I, that I recognize music?

Well, I realized that music is this thing that exists outside of time, and that it is just like anything that means anything at all. Everything that has meaning exists for ever and lasts forever, because how else could it not? Those were kind-of, sort-of the thoughts that were going through my head about two hours ago. And for that brief, one moment out of a million moments, I felt like I belonged. That I was natural, and that I was okay.

And right at the peak of that feeling, right when it was really really kicking in, this cat. This cat came slithering up out of the shadows. This cat was making a beeline for me, with just about all the purpose that a cat can muster... but that never happens. That isn't supposed to happen. Cats don't act like that, especially stranger cats. If they did, I wouldn't have given two and a half hoots. Cats don't happen like that. Not to me... not when I'm out walking, anyway. Stranger cats just don't come shunting toward me along purposeful, predetermined paths.

What it felt like, was... this cat, which exists in this perfect state of nature, only ever doing what it is supposed to and meant to do, homed in on my moment of clarity.

This stranger cat just up and appeared out of the zilch and entangled my quanta with its q-bits, and for about a minute it seemed as though I thought that I knew what a moment was. That cat.

And that's all. The universe smells pretty good right now, so I'm going to go to sleep.