Attachment, detachment, fear, hope, strength, illusion, consciousness, mindfulness. Just a few of the things that rattle around in my skull a lot lately. Tonight I was driving home from work and there was a full moon in the sky. As I got to the end of Dunns Road I pulled over to the side of the road and pulled out the cd case that had been lying in the floorboard of the passenger seat. I flipped through the pages and found the cd I was looking for, ejected another cd from the stereo system and inserted the new one. I clicked the tracks ahead until I found the song I wanted. As the first notes of the song started I illuminated the headlights of the truck, shifted the transmission into drive and pulled back onto the highway. Audioslave’s “I am the Highway” erupted from the speakers. Chris Cornell’s singular strong voice crashed against the walls of the truck cab and against the interior of my mind.
“I was lost in the city…alone….in the hills…”
I screamed the lyrics at the top of my lungs as I navigated the truck along the winding symmetry of Highway 19. 19 years ago I was 19 years old.
Why is it that I try to possess things? Deep down I know that there is nothing to be gained and nothing to lose. In my core I know that this entire life is an illusion. Every single bit of it is a dream. It seems so real. It seems so lasting and permanent. But in reality it is anything but. I am spirit. WE are spirit. The clothes we wear, the cars we drive, the schools we attend, the houses we build...they are all window dressing on a mind-blowing infinite existence. None of it matters. I build myself up…for what? For whom? For why? Life is a breath. Life is a heartbeat. Life is a gift. We bump into each other. Like seemingly random little atoms spinning around a bright burning nucleus.
I remember faces of strangers I never knew. Eyes that lock for a moment, maybe two and disappear into the netherworld ether of passing time. Sometimes we form relationships, sometimes we develop a “history” together, a collection of thoughts, words, memories, actions, photographs, shared experiences. We were both there. Don’t you remember? But what you remember and what I remember are often two VERY different things. We’re all bumping around in our own heads. We connect and then disconnect. We link up and then we break apart. Somewhere beneath it all there is some grand accounting I am sure. There is a book, a film, a diary…of each soul’s existence and each incarnation of that soul. And there are as many different angles as there are particles of dust swirling in space.
But I want a GIRLFRIEND!!!! And I want that GIRLFRIEND to be HER!!!! Hahahahahaha! How small we are! How petty! The moon looks down with an amused glow at all of our jostling, posturing and activity. The sun spurs us on. “But I didn’t get THIS or THAT!!! So and so did THIS to me!!!” Crazy apes in designer clothes for sure.
When I used to take LSD it was like washing away all the detritus of existence. It was like a great cleansing. 12 hours of NOW. Half of an earth spin of mind-altered kaleidoscopic REALITY. The human mind doing cartwheels with its own imagination and wonder. Oceans became puddles and puddles became oceans. Ordinary everyday birds were transformed into pterodactyls. Power lines became arteries. Automobiles living creatures. The life and source behind every single “thing” was illuminated and exposed as something entirely different than its workaday signature “self.” I, too, was illuminated and exposed, all my memories, relationships, hopes, fears, triumphs, defeats…the warmness of the womb, the light breaking the horizon of the windowpane in my elementary school bedroom, the radiators in classrooms dripping with melted crayon. Tongue swirling kisses with girls, fist-fights with boys, spankings from parents, memory and emotion riding the lysergic wave through the cavern of my skull.
Once you take LSD you are forever changed, altered. It’s a trip you never really come back from because part of your mind stays there. Part of you cannot forget what you saw, what you felt, and the way existence creaked and groaned and slithered before you. I’ve taken enough of it that I don’t ever need to take it again. The world and all its glory and confusion, all its ugliness and beauty, all its joy and pain is a dream. A dream! It’s not real! The you behind you is real. The thoughts are real. The actions are real only in that they are produced by thought. But the actual physical plane that these things occur on is fiction.
This is why when I miss my father I know I am not really missing my father. I am missing the spirit that was in the man that was my father. I am missing the memories of him carved into my thought center. What happens when we die? My dad once told me that he had an experience with dying long, long ago…in the house I grew up in. He left his body; he looked down on the bed, on the house, on the neighborhood, on existence. He was not afraid. He saw light and felt a warm glow envelope him. And in a moment a voice that did not speak communicated to him that it was not time and so he descended back into his body lying in the bed next to my mother. He told me this the last time we were both together here at the farm. We were sitting outside beneath the stars with a bright burning fire on the ground at our feet. We had become friends. His seed fertilized my body into existence and he fed me, clothed me, educated me, put a roof over my head. He disciplined me and nurtured me, bailed me out of trouble, protected me, loved me. These things live. These things endure. The rest falls away.
The highway is empty tonight. No fellow travelers under the moon here on this road. Only deer, trees and white painted lines on black asphalt beneath the stoic mountains and glittering lunar light. And it occurs to me…in a blink of nothing…
I am the highway. I am the sky. I am the light.
Crazy apes in designer clothes...yes for sure. This is just a series of moments.
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