Copyright 2022 by Cheryl Andrews. All rights reserved. No portion of this excerpt for brief review may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means - electronic, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise - without the written permission of the author.
Life
An explosive thought
Let there be…
A more explosive thought
I am…
The trees are too naked to hide today. They too came into this world with a history. As above so below. As within so without. Space inviolate.
Before thought, the turtle graveyard forms. Their skeletal remains mystical fossils occupy earth’s womb underneath Borneo Island. Naked as the trees, I follow the underwater portals, breathe in the warm water pockets and cold darkness till I touch the stillborn remains amongst their mother’s calcified cracked shells and white ribs with my eyes. Their mother’s skulls round and hallow as their children’s still white shells. The ocean not having had enough of its spaciousness steals the tears from my eyes.
My wound revealed.
In this graveyard the turtles’ sleep. Their shapeless flesh dreams in its most wild form for the darkness has no memory of once there was and once there was not. They float graceful in consort with each exhalation. Inside each ending, each death somehow somewhere in the delicate layers as the sediment thickens there is both heart and breath. The heart beats. As one side empties, the other fills. When one breath exhales, another inhales. The dream continues. Borneo Island continues. I continue.
This morning the sun woke my mind before my eyes. Do I Move You sings in the background inside the redness behind my closed lids. And I think. Did Covid infect the trees?
It’s an ancient thought. Illness. It comes with deep experience.
Long, long ago a story, a human story on Death and Fear:
A man asks Death. “Where are you going?”
“To the next town.”
“For what?”
“To kill four of them.”
A plague kills trillions.
The man scolds Death. “You told me you were only going to kill four of them, but so many, too many have died. How are we to survive? Why did you do this?”
Death answers. “I killed only four. The rest died of fear.”
I did not understand at the time, I was too young and already too much inside the human world to understand this connection between illness and change, between body and mind; how two create one. All I knew was my world. My human world of starvation.
As with everything there are exceptions. The dirt knows. The plants know. The animals know. Born first, they know the difference between what beckons to us and what calls us from our souls. I was born animal and plant yet wholly neither, Human. I forget. It is my nature to forget what desires to be remembered.
The first dream came to me as a seed. Planted after I was assigned the monumental task to find a new earth. A new planet for the survivors. Chosen for my mind, I was one of twenty Astrobiologists, Astrophysicists, Astro Engineers, Planetary Geologists, Organic Chemists, and Remote Viewers. We huddled together to save the human race from extinction.
Earth is ripe with extinction. There have been many since Spider Woman fell from the single black dit and pilled wet earth on Turtle’s back. A single black dot of something 13.8 billion years ago. A single seed, a thought exploded into a Universe.
“The power is in the seed.” The grass told me. A single green seed. 13.8 billion years ago and still life lives in its continuous single violent expansion. Space. Code and solvent. Transmission and membrane. Viscosity and matter. Self-contained. Whole.
Heated darkness expands and cools. Everything needed to thrive floats collides shapes and reshapes bonds electrical charges and elementals. Objects in space mirror the circular cell, the single celled Cyanobacteria.
“You must eat.” The grass tells me. “Eat the dirt. Drink the water. Rest.”
My hunger explodes. I feed on myself. Replicate myself by myself. I became more. More and more my body infinitely cloned. Layers and layers settle into land. Crust. A planet solidifies into a rotational bilateral symmetry and places me on the end of 12.
9 billion years in time darkness pierced itself anew. Birth of the sun, a supernova so violently bright. Heat and light empty the darkness.
Bacteria eats bacteria. Evolves. Expands. Eliminates. Splits itself. Two cells each retains volume and identity. Digested sugar from these dual bodies expels methane and carbon dioxide. More life. More space. Gasses form an outer environment.
All this in a single cycle. Menstrual blood and acidic moist darkness. Beauty on a pad buoyant in tangy juice. The double helix. Rudimentary transmission in volume and identity of the body, in the body, for the body.
“Eat the seed.”
I eat the seed. Mash it between my teeth and salivating tongue. Roll it between my cheeks, listen as I swallow. Hear it open inside me. Space held more fully awake in this body’s experience. Spring awakens. I place myself inside it, unfold with it, expand along with it. This experience, this deathless death of being alive.
Oh my love, the mountains are happy to stay right where they are. As am I. This body, my body was made from the earth. Made to survive here. And here I remain.
I’m restless today. Laugh! I know you will. Yes, I am always restless, and today more so. Tell me, do we get what we deserve?
When I close my eyes, your voice, your hands touch all of me. Perhaps I ask too much in wanting to know the truth. And now… everyone will know.
And how wonderful, rain! A soothing deluge. Windows and door open. The saturated air with the slightest scent of wet earth rolls into the house. Cool Waves from the falling rain ripples outward, and I wish we were lying in bed next to each other listening, absorbing each expanding vibration. We become more and more connected as we breathe each other in and widen along with the ripples, outward.
The sweet rain invites us out to play. Our bare feet above the wet earth. Wet bodies embrace her restoration, as she gives back everything we’ve lost. Youth. Time. Exuberance. Innocence. Love. Love strong enough to hold a lifetime together in a single wet drop. A single moment. This very moment in my mind, we are together, making love in the wet grass. How you penetrate me with your eyes before you even touch me. How I desire you!
Each drop on my skin, a new moment with you, absorb and lived more deeply inside me. You all the way inside me, at my very core. You are me. I am you.
If we are never together again, as I so deeply pray we will, I am grateful for this moment. The rain on my skin. Your breath across my lips. Your hands in my hair. Your weight on my wet skin. Your musk and wet grass held at the back of my throat.
Many moments more my love. As many as falling rain on a restless day, a tired day, any day, every day!
The phone chimes hysterical. An abandoned child I refuse to acknowledge. I fold the paper in half again and again let it play at being a tiny square rather than my heart. I slip it under my bra and exhale.
“Yugen here.” I answer.
“We’re live in five.”
“How much time do I have?”
“It doesn’t matter. Once you tell them. No one will listen to anything else you have to say.”
“How much time?”
“30 minutes.”
“That’s not enough time to start at the beginning.”
“Then start in the middle. I don’t care. Get your ass on set.”
The middle. The midpoint. Earth is the midpoint. Her whole system of biological metronomes synchronized through each grand exhalation burst out of her celestial skin into the cosmos. Each inhalation a parallel story where we understand our departure only as we realize our arrival. Awareness experienced as the curved glyph shape a figure eight on its side, looped onto itself like a lemniscate. The midpoint concurrently the place of departure and arrival. The fabric of existence itself.
“We don’t have time for makeup. Sit here.”
“I can’t start in the middle. They won’t understand.”
He steps behind the cameras. “Tell them it won’t hurt.” He glances at his watch. “We’re live in 3, 2, 1…”
Endoderm:
The first stage is Survival
… to fulfill the functions of adapting to and satisfying the basis needs of life –
breathe, eat, eliminate, and reproduce.
Even if we are thoroughly modern women and men of the third millennium, we still work, deep inside, according to old perfectly archaic laws with a single, sole objective: to survive as long as possible, adapting to the environmental pressures.
Laurent Daillie
Under the pavement, the dirt is dreaming of Grass.
Wendell Berry
TomBo - Chapter P
Polarities define the flesh. The split experience in the flesh, of the flesh, by the flesh: Two eyes. Two ears. Two nostrils. Two lips. Two arms. Two hands. Two legs, two feet. The left brain. The right brain. The right ventricle. The left ventricle. Each side experiences the world as a separate being. The body splits the world into one version of itself to be seen, to be realized as a tailored individualized learning. This creates tension. The push toward, the pull away often unbearable and passionate. We fail to remember this tension delivers us right into the middle of an unnamable emptiness, where all polarities cease to exist, as they arise into the manifestation of each other. We choose this embodiment of separation where the one becomes two for the Joy of becoming one again. Here we are complete. Here we are free.
Once there was and once there was not.
Earth is the midpoint, the pause in this collective story. The place of memory, Earth is Eden. The garden where we gather the bones and find medicine in the seed.
“Do not look for me.” Whispered in my ears.
I was tiny. A child knelt by a fallen tree cradled in slime mold. The wind wafted pockets of pine throughout the forest, through the space all around. Transfixed by the mold’s luminous transparency, I watched the whole of it beat and breathe without heart or lungs. All of it pulsed. A single action minus the two organs needed to perform the dual function. I asked to know its singularity and closed my eyes, tried to be its single action. My lungs decompressed. Breath slowed. My drum felt is own smoothness. Heat exsanguinated. Deep in my body I saw a spot. Then I was in the spot expanding the spot.
“I am right in front of you. See me not through me.” She said. “Don’t fall away from the earth. Dig deeper, down deeper beyond the skeleton trees erect as they hibernate. Let green earth roll solid into black holy stone. Untangle time. Stretch the darkness. Fold it backwards. Hold it alive as a seedling under snow.”
My eyes awaken. She floats above the tree, her round dark eyes beckon head… no love, love… me. She hovers. Her dew spotted transparent veiny leafed wings draw a weightless invisible curved glyph in the air. Blows her wind through me. Leaves her message in my skin. Fly with me. I hear. Above the trees. In the River of Air. Her long red insect body raises up and up and up. It is only when I close my eyes to the distance between us, I see her rising as red sand, a single grain weightless in a drop of water.
I will find you. Her voice everywhere and nowhere, inside me and everywhere around me moves my insides all at once.
I returned to the tree many times as my breathing body grew in age and learned to take up more and more space. Space seeped in longing, an ache to embody something known yet unnamable. A grandness, a newbornness hibernates in the folded darkness in the spot inside my human body. And each time my legs motion toward the tree or away from it my longing to hold something invisible, shadowy, and nowhere to be seen surfaces again and again as physical painful debilitating fear disguised as grief. My flesh, my mind, my soul weeps.
In my teens, I eased the longing with books. Something I could hold, press against my chest and know it existed. I existed. Their words held firm on the page, I read myself into the invisible ache spreading inside me as my body grew. I read to feel it, to cry for it, to remember it. Pages from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous touched so often they swelled, rolled inward, and yellowed in the latent chemical reaction of my finger’s oily skin, carbon dioxide I breathed down into their words, and the pause between readings. Each visitation, a meditation never fully realized as each sensuous word touched around the longing, gave it its own motion across the page. Felt inside my flesh, it pushed through me, took into itself everything in its path. It built an inner world with it, upon it till the longing became its own body inside mine.
When reading failed to embody the invisible, I’d write. I’d write for months, over and over. I’d try to write myself into the ache, to ease the gnawing twisting constricting muscles around my bones. Write to break myself open and wildly suck the marrow from within. I labored, pleaded, bartered. And still something refused to remember, to surrender. Something kept me at the threshold howling at the door, unable to do anything but see through myself.
I gave my body’s sensuous and sentient life two worlds. The flesh and the mind. The Forest and Science. Each contained. Single organisms kept separate from the outside world within myself, from myself. I left the forest. Buried the mystical. Moved to New York City. Bought a car. Parked it. Forgot to remember. Turned to science. Based my dissertation on a fleeting experience I may or may not have imagined. Titled it Singularity of Being: The Consanguinity of Space. Hypnotized Space to be the one true solvent. Invisible tasteless scentless matter-full space. The container of everything and nothing all at once.
Tombo’s first breath inhaled the river under the river. Breath for Tombo is not as I know breath, or you know breath with lungs dilated by capacity. Tombo’s breath surrounds as motion made fluid. Fluid as a Geisha’s long fingers. Her hand already in the stories motion guides your eyes down into the circular whirlpool, down into the dark silence. The invisible grace whirling between her fingers awakens an impulse to hold your breath. A wildness in you, something fierce and demanding holds you captive in the largeness burning your lungs. You hold it as it holds you. Past comfort. Past your own knowing that without breath there is no life. You hold it beyond fear. Hold it till your instinct to survive takes over, forces you to gasp full breaths, shove air in as fast as you can. Your neck lengths, your head look up, see Tombo’s nymph of a body swim under the frozen subarctic Oyashio current. Tombo floats in and around the luminous ice. Blocks in motion toward the Shiretoko Peninsula carrying you inside wave after wave caught in the ocean’s motion.
“Father. Why do dragonflies have wings?”
“It is the way they remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Water.”
Life itself thrives on moisture.
Dive in and the ocean’s greed for warmth pulls it from your flesh. Your temperature drifts away as you lack the fat reserves to remain buoyant in your humanness. Wave after wave weightless and slow, slow, slow water dreams through you. Lays you down low in the spacious enormity with no ground beneath your feet. Electric underwater, a Humpback swims with its mouth open, pushes water through its lungs like passion. See the fisherman’s harpoon love the flesh. Love it as it cuts as if never having sliced or itself been exposed to danger before. The heart bleeds.
Touch the moment, its essence, its painful sensuousness undone by time as one moment transpires into the next and the next and the next. The whale’s bones etched into a cave wall, to be drawn again by Leonardo on paper. Now unmade by time you lie patiently in this closed place with bones stripped and bare, serving as an armature for the mountain placed over you. (p20)
Life
An explosive thought
Let there be…
A more explosive thought
I am…
The trees are too naked to hide today. They too came into this world with a history. As above so below. As within so without. Space inviolate.
Before thought, the turtle graveyard forms. Their skeletal remains mystical fossils occupy earth’s womb underneath Borneo Island. Naked as the trees, I follow the underwater portals, breathe in the warm water pockets and cold darkness till I touch the stillborn remains amongst their mother’s calcified cracked shells and white ribs with my eyes. Their mother’s skulls round and hallow as their children’s still white shells. The ocean not having had enough of its spaciousness steals the tears from my eyes.
My wound revealed.
In this graveyard the turtles’ sleep. Their shapeless flesh dreams in its most wild form for the darkness has no memory of once there was and once there was not. They float graceful in consort with each exhalation. Inside each ending, each death somehow somewhere in the delicate layers as the sediment thickens there is both heart and breath. The heart beats. As one side empties, the other fills. When one breath exhales, another inhales. The dream continues. Borneo Island continues. I continue.
This morning the sun woke my mind before my eyes. Do I Move You sings in the background inside the redness behind my closed lids. And I think. Did Covid infect the trees?
It’s an ancient thought. Illness. It comes with deep experience.
Long, long ago a story, a human story on Death and Fear:
A man asks Death. “Where are you going?”
“To the next town.”
“For what?”
“To kill four of them.”
A plague kills trillions.
The man scolds Death. “You told me you were only going to kill four of them, but so many, too many have died. How are we to survive? Why did you do this?”
Death answers. “I killed only four. The rest died of fear.”
I did not understand at the time, I was too young and already too much inside the human world to understand this connection between illness and change, between body and mind; how two create one. All I knew was my world. My human world of starvation.
As with everything there are exceptions. The dirt knows. The plants know. The animals know. Born first, they know the difference between what beckons to us and what calls us from our souls. I was born animal and plant yet wholly neither, Human. I forget. It is my nature to forget what desires to be remembered.
The first dream came to me as a seed. Planted after I was assigned the monumental task to find a new earth. A new planet for the survivors. Chosen for my mind, I was one of twenty Astrobiologists, Astrophysicists, Astro Engineers, Planetary Geologists, Organic Chemists, and Remote Viewers. We huddled together to save the human race from extinction.
Earth is ripe with extinction. There have been many since Spider Woman fell from the single black dit and pilled wet earth on Turtle’s back. A single black dot of something 13.8 billion years ago. A single seed, a thought exploded into a Universe.
“The power is in the seed.” The grass told me. A single green seed. 13.8 billion years ago and still life lives in its continuous single violent expansion. Space. Code and solvent. Transmission and membrane. Viscosity and matter. Self-contained. Whole.
Heated darkness expands and cools. Everything needed to thrive floats collides shapes and reshapes bonds electrical charges and elementals. Objects in space mirror the circular cell, the single celled Cyanobacteria.
“You must eat.” The grass tells me. “Eat the dirt. Drink the water. Rest.”
My hunger explodes. I feed on myself. Replicate myself by myself. I became more. More and more my body infinitely cloned. Layers and layers settle into land. Crust. A planet solidifies into a rotational bilateral symmetry and places me on the end of 12.
9 billion years in time darkness pierced itself anew. Birth of the sun, a supernova so violently bright. Heat and light empty the darkness.
Bacteria eats bacteria. Evolves. Expands. Eliminates. Splits itself. Two cells each retains volume and identity. Digested sugar from these dual bodies expels methane and carbon dioxide. More life. More space. Gasses form an outer environment.
All this in a single cycle. Menstrual blood and acidic moist darkness. Beauty on a pad buoyant in tangy juice. The double helix. Rudimentary transmission in volume and identity of the body, in the body, for the body.
“Eat the seed.”
I eat the seed. Mash it between my teeth and salivating tongue. Roll it between my cheeks, listen as I swallow. Hear it open inside me. Space held more fully awake in this body’s experience. Spring awakens. I place myself inside it, unfold with it, expand along with it. This experience, this deathless death of being alive.
Oh my love, the mountains are happy to stay right where they are. As am I. This body, my body was made from the earth. Made to survive here. And here I remain.
I’m restless today. Laugh! I know you will. Yes, I am always restless, and today more so. Tell me, do we get what we deserve?
When I close my eyes, your voice, your hands touch all of me. Perhaps I ask too much in wanting to know the truth. And now… everyone will know.
And how wonderful, rain! A soothing deluge. Windows and door open. The saturated air with the slightest scent of wet earth rolls into the house. Cool Waves from the falling rain ripples outward, and I wish we were lying in bed next to each other listening, absorbing each expanding vibration. We become more and more connected as we breathe each other in and widen along with the ripples, outward.
The sweet rain invites us out to play. Our bare feet above the wet earth. Wet bodies embrace her restoration, as she gives back everything we’ve lost. Youth. Time. Exuberance. Innocence. Love. Love strong enough to hold a lifetime together in a single wet drop. A single moment. This very moment in my mind, we are together, making love in the wet grass. How you penetrate me with your eyes before you even touch me. How I desire you!
Each drop on my skin, a new moment with you, absorb and lived more deeply inside me. You all the way inside me, at my very core. You are me. I am you.
If we are never together again, as I so deeply pray we will, I am grateful for this moment. The rain on my skin. Your breath across my lips. Your hands in my hair. Your weight on my wet skin. Your musk and wet grass held at the back of my throat.
Many moments more my love. As many as falling rain on a restless day, a tired day, any day, every day!
The phone chimes hysterical. An abandoned child I refuse to acknowledge. I fold the paper in half again and again let it play at being a tiny square rather than my heart. I slip it under my bra and exhale.
“Yugen here.” I answer.
“We’re live in five.”
“How much time do I have?”
“It doesn’t matter. Once you tell them. No one will listen to anything else you have to say.”
“How much time?”
“30 minutes.”
“That’s not enough time to start at the beginning.”
“Then start in the middle. I don’t care. Get your ass on set.”
The middle. The midpoint. Earth is the midpoint. Her whole system of biological metronomes synchronized through each grand exhalation burst out of her celestial skin into the cosmos. Each inhalation a parallel story where we understand our departure only as we realize our arrival. Awareness experienced as the curved glyph shape a figure eight on its side, looped onto itself like a lemniscate. The midpoint concurrently the place of departure and arrival. The fabric of existence itself.
“We don’t have time for makeup. Sit here.”
“I can’t start in the middle. They won’t understand.”
He steps behind the cameras. “Tell them it won’t hurt.” He glances at his watch. “We’re live in 3, 2, 1…”
Endoderm:
The first stage is Survival
… to fulfill the functions of adapting to and satisfying the basis needs of life –
breathe, eat, eliminate, and reproduce.
Even if we are thoroughly modern women and men of the third millennium, we still work, deep inside, according to old perfectly archaic laws with a single, sole objective: to survive as long as possible, adapting to the environmental pressures.
Laurent Daillie
Under the pavement, the dirt is dreaming of Grass.
Wendell Berry
TomBo - Chapter P
Polarities define the flesh. The split experience in the flesh, of the flesh, by the flesh: Two eyes. Two ears. Two nostrils. Two lips. Two arms. Two hands. Two legs, two feet. The left brain. The right brain. The right ventricle. The left ventricle. Each side experiences the world as a separate being. The body splits the world into one version of itself to be seen, to be realized as a tailored individualized learning. This creates tension. The push toward, the pull away often unbearable and passionate. We fail to remember this tension delivers us right into the middle of an unnamable emptiness, where all polarities cease to exist, as they arise into the manifestation of each other. We choose this embodiment of separation where the one becomes two for the Joy of becoming one again. Here we are complete. Here we are free.
Once there was and once there was not.
Earth is the midpoint, the pause in this collective story. The place of memory, Earth is Eden. The garden where we gather the bones and find medicine in the seed.
“Do not look for me.” Whispered in my ears.
I was tiny. A child knelt by a fallen tree cradled in slime mold. The wind wafted pockets of pine throughout the forest, through the space all around. Transfixed by the mold’s luminous transparency, I watched the whole of it beat and breathe without heart or lungs. All of it pulsed. A single action minus the two organs needed to perform the dual function. I asked to know its singularity and closed my eyes, tried to be its single action. My lungs decompressed. Breath slowed. My drum felt is own smoothness. Heat exsanguinated. Deep in my body I saw a spot. Then I was in the spot expanding the spot.
“I am right in front of you. See me not through me.” She said. “Don’t fall away from the earth. Dig deeper, down deeper beyond the skeleton trees erect as they hibernate. Let green earth roll solid into black holy stone. Untangle time. Stretch the darkness. Fold it backwards. Hold it alive as a seedling under snow.”
My eyes awaken. She floats above the tree, her round dark eyes beckon head… no love, love… me. She hovers. Her dew spotted transparent veiny leafed wings draw a weightless invisible curved glyph in the air. Blows her wind through me. Leaves her message in my skin. Fly with me. I hear. Above the trees. In the River of Air. Her long red insect body raises up and up and up. It is only when I close my eyes to the distance between us, I see her rising as red sand, a single grain weightless in a drop of water.
I will find you. Her voice everywhere and nowhere, inside me and everywhere around me moves my insides all at once.
I returned to the tree many times as my breathing body grew in age and learned to take up more and more space. Space seeped in longing, an ache to embody something known yet unnamable. A grandness, a newbornness hibernates in the folded darkness in the spot inside my human body. And each time my legs motion toward the tree or away from it my longing to hold something invisible, shadowy, and nowhere to be seen surfaces again and again as physical painful debilitating fear disguised as grief. My flesh, my mind, my soul weeps.
In my teens, I eased the longing with books. Something I could hold, press against my chest and know it existed. I existed. Their words held firm on the page, I read myself into the invisible ache spreading inside me as my body grew. I read to feel it, to cry for it, to remember it. Pages from David Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous touched so often they swelled, rolled inward, and yellowed in the latent chemical reaction of my finger’s oily skin, carbon dioxide I breathed down into their words, and the pause between readings. Each visitation, a meditation never fully realized as each sensuous word touched around the longing, gave it its own motion across the page. Felt inside my flesh, it pushed through me, took into itself everything in its path. It built an inner world with it, upon it till the longing became its own body inside mine.
When reading failed to embody the invisible, I’d write. I’d write for months, over and over. I’d try to write myself into the ache, to ease the gnawing twisting constricting muscles around my bones. Write to break myself open and wildly suck the marrow from within. I labored, pleaded, bartered. And still something refused to remember, to surrender. Something kept me at the threshold howling at the door, unable to do anything but see through myself.
I gave my body’s sensuous and sentient life two worlds. The flesh and the mind. The Forest and Science. Each contained. Single organisms kept separate from the outside world within myself, from myself. I left the forest. Buried the mystical. Moved to New York City. Bought a car. Parked it. Forgot to remember. Turned to science. Based my dissertation on a fleeting experience I may or may not have imagined. Titled it Singularity of Being: The Consanguinity of Space. Hypnotized Space to be the one true solvent. Invisible tasteless scentless matter-full space. The container of everything and nothing all at once.
Tombo’s first breath inhaled the river under the river. Breath for Tombo is not as I know breath, or you know breath with lungs dilated by capacity. Tombo’s breath surrounds as motion made fluid. Fluid as a Geisha’s long fingers. Her hand already in the stories motion guides your eyes down into the circular whirlpool, down into the dark silence. The invisible grace whirling between her fingers awakens an impulse to hold your breath. A wildness in you, something fierce and demanding holds you captive in the largeness burning your lungs. You hold it as it holds you. Past comfort. Past your own knowing that without breath there is no life. You hold it beyond fear. Hold it till your instinct to survive takes over, forces you to gasp full breaths, shove air in as fast as you can. Your neck lengths, your head look up, see Tombo’s nymph of a body swim under the frozen subarctic Oyashio current. Tombo floats in and around the luminous ice. Blocks in motion toward the Shiretoko Peninsula carrying you inside wave after wave caught in the ocean’s motion.
“Father. Why do dragonflies have wings?”
“It is the way they remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Water.”
Life itself thrives on moisture.
Dive in and the ocean’s greed for warmth pulls it from your flesh. Your temperature drifts away as you lack the fat reserves to remain buoyant in your humanness. Wave after wave weightless and slow, slow, slow water dreams through you. Lays you down low in the spacious enormity with no ground beneath your feet. Electric underwater, a Humpback swims with its mouth open, pushes water through its lungs like passion. See the fisherman’s harpoon love the flesh. Love it as it cuts as if never having sliced or itself been exposed to danger before. The heart bleeds.
Touch the moment, its essence, its painful sensuousness undone by time as one moment transpires into the next and the next and the next. The whale’s bones etched into a cave wall, to be drawn again by Leonardo on paper. Now unmade by time you lie patiently in this closed place with bones stripped and bare, serving as an armature for the mountain placed over you. (p20)