PEERING DEEPER

Looking into this matter led me to momentarily believe I was fundamentally shaping the essence of creation itself. With a gradually developing astonishment I realized all my inaction and activities combined to help forge not just my own fate, but that of a whole splinter shard of a world which may have continued without me, but which I'm told would dissipate like so much mist at the moment of my demise. Why would that be? I wondered. If, upon my extraction from holistic events, the world I'd helped shape around me disintegrated as the mass quotidian snake of time continued to engorge on the ever flowing radiation of circumstances winding into the infinite coil, then one could be led to see how a super conductor like that wound up into a pill--a single dose super nova, shall we say--that when popped, goes down like a black hole expanding in your chest. If you know what I mean. If you don't, you really ought to try it sometime. See, it ruined me; but that's not to say you won't manage to walk away from the experience in more or less one piece, a bit ruffled sure, but that goes without saying when your connection to the entire universe has been made crystal clear to you in every sense of the term. Some handle the process and survive it with their minds intact, some don't--they're just never the same person again. There's nothing you or I or anyone else can do about that. No there isn't, and that's because we both know we're all in this together, aren't we. Of course we are. Now we're beginning to get a better sense of the picture. It's coming into focus from the abstract. A continually coiling series of reflective questions, like an unfinished glance still bouncing off a bending hall of mirrors, going around a corner and unfolding as you travel down the twisting corridor of your life, spiraling onward into depths which only seem fathomless, because our predestined arrival may be the only foregone conclusion which has yet to complete itself here, like a sunset sinking into the darkest distant sea, only to pass beyond the roiling waters and sparkle true and lucid blue, as a swallowed gimlet winking out before being hugely swung back around, to come hurling upwards from the darkened other end, only to bring about the warming influence of another dawning sunrise, as the case has always been, and will always continue to be. But I was meant to be ruined, you see. Because the old me, I was so one dimensional. Like an ant walking down a line because someone had carefully aligned sugar crystals along it. Just following dots that weren't even there. It's how we all start off, that's why I'm writing this. While I can still remember that portion of it. We are subject to complete irradiation at all times. It's not a matter of merely opening up one's eyes. It's a matter of breathing evenly and inhaling so deeply that one suddenly makes a connection between the expanding universe and one's own gently in-drawn breath. It has been this group effort which keeps propelling us ever forward as electromagnetically charged particles circling through the pumping bloodstream of what I like to think of as the elemental progenitor itself. A place where within and without have always intertwined. A man must not ask if a bug can dream lest he remain prepared for the answer, I was told by a stranger, at a bus stop in the rain, once. That was a long time ago in a far away place, and today I wonder in what possible manner could it still be tied to me here and now, with my eyes rolled back into my head revealing white under sides as fields of snow slip away backward on the falling crest of the incoming waves crashing down late at night with a cold moon wavering along the reflected racing ribbon haunting the skull lit shore. I drink in the scene with all of my senses. It's just the moon's face reflected in a looking glass, I keep repeating to myself. But it's also so much more when reconstructed after the projected unraveling motion has been wound back up in one's mind. The fading tracers of our satellite's light reveal the eternal winding of a brilliant cocoon whose design has been often confused with a tomb, but whose purpose, I am beginning to grow suspicious now more than ever, much more resembles that of an emerging chrysalis. At least this is what I've been saying. I've been looking into this matter extensively for years. Strangest of all, it appears that the matter has been looking into me. I cannot say I can positively explain the phenomenon to the satisfaction of my reader, but I will try my best. It's that while in the act of looking into things I became oddly conscious that things had been looking into me, except that now it was my turn. Furthermore, I was bothered by the notion that this exchange was one of many, that in fact it was a ritual of sorts, a temporarily ongoing occasion, something committed with as much regularity as the eating of breakfast, at the very least. That's the best that I can describe it. When I'm not fully focused on something, with exacting concentration, then this thing which I suppose may be seen as the remainder of all creation in the universe itself  reverts to its careful and deliberate studying of me, here alone in this singular apartment dwelling in the city. Just another good worker ant in the industrious hive complex, built up alongside the encroaching foothills of the New England coastline. Back in the farthest reaches behind the corner of my mind's eye, I smile and think to myself how I've found the alien inside me who first discovered the human race. I know it now as just another facet of our ever morphing cosmic face.