Month: July 2019

From Where I Pretend this Game

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I let myself sink.

As I sink into the cold embrace of sand and earth, I feel I’m being pulled by the call of the stars above. I move up and down, in and out, both at the same time. I panic for a moment. I grab on to the earth, trying to hold on––no longer to a vestige of humanity, of memory, of purpose. I just try to hang on to any remnant of sensation–even if just of my fingers trying to crack.

Even what used to be strength of hands have become simple waves of electrical pathways, electrical storm all around; the pathway of lightning strike flowing through an empty body, no longer resisting sound or light; a pure vessel no longer existing, no longer present.

I pretend now for the sake of argument that I remember being some thing, some one, perhaps. I pretend for the sake of the game that I sit on a chair, that a body contains me, that the ocean before me does not inundate the space a mind used to occupy.

I pretend for the sake of the semblance of sanity that it is my voice that I hear, that the ocean I observe is an ocean like any other, that one day I will no longer fight the eternal presence of the naked reality.

I pretend that I forgot the empty space without. I pretend that I move in a world round, made of mud and fire; that I walk upon its surface in a body created from the ocean’s salty waters that contains life, movement, purpose.

I pretend that I have a life. I immerse myself no longer in the memory of the beloved but in the dreaming, in the flow of illusions. I realize that I do not need to lose myself in a completely created constructed reality. It is perhaps enough to grab a tiny piece of a memory… a sound… a word; maybe her eyes; maybe a fight; maybe the pretension that I cared about what was happening to me at some point or another in a lifetime that no longer concerns me, or you, or anyone else.

I pretend that I’ve forgotten, that I care about what happens to this illusion of self and memory.

I pretend that I become fascinated with the shiny lights below, reflecting those other stars lost in the immensity of darkness. I look at the grains of sand. I make them important. I turn them into light, into fire, into sensation. The sensation gives way to a form of hand, of arm, of movement, of once space following the other.

Logic, flowing. Language, forming. Yes, no. Dark, light. Good, bad. Male, female. Up and down. Nice and pain. I make it into a game, pretending that the shadows do follow the movement of the body.

A Familiar Space

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I sit suspended in an infinite ocean of light and emptiness. From this island of ephemeral beingness is that I see the source of a sound, a small stirring of something, movement and rhythm, repetition. The singing of crickets. A high pitched vibration––not yet knowing if it’s called light or sound.

It starts maybe just as a hint of something, a barely perceptible smell coming from somewhere that I simply call the familiar space.

I sit in this silence in the midst of a lifetime, knowing in part that there is another space. When I sit in intense presence, in the midst of death, I hear movements. Some coming from me. I hear movements coming from outside, from above, from below. Movements which my mind tries to categorize as familiar entities. But somehow I know that something moves outside in strange ways; presences, nameless in eternity. Stirrings of will. Subtle flickers of sound and light.

I know  I am supposed to be something, but the thing that puts together the world does not seem to be fully functioning at this moment. I see my hands. I call them my hands, yet they move on their own accord even if there is no I that moves. I see hints of legs. I hear a voice I call my voice, yet it flows from a space I cannot touch. I move my arm and I do not know how I move my arm. Out of convention I say “I move my arm,” but what produces the movement of shadows and sound? What brings the vibration, the echo of silence that surrounds this body? What brings and moves the cold within––the shadow of death?

If I close my eyes, I sense parts of my body. More accurately, I sense sensations. Around the heart, below, above, I sense a field of presence all around. If I open my eyes, I seem to feel a space before movement, yet  the space I sense is very limited; much more limited than I thought.

I push my hands against this membrane. I push the membrane and I feel you closer. Yet the idea that the world is one is only a projection of my mind. The idea that my body is one is only a projection of my mind. All I can be conscious of is the flickers of sensation––impulses of light and sound that come and move within.

At the Shores of Night

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I open my arms to accept, to receive, to welcome this impossibly gentle touch, this impossibly gentle weight.

I open my arms and my heart opens almost as if by mistake. It lifts something of me. It pulls me into its immense reality that seems to erase every other thought, every other doing. It moves in strange ways. My body begins to merge with the quietude; with the solitude; with the loneliness of this long, long night.

I don’t know how long I’ve been doing this. I don’t know how many times I have dissolved myself––merged into it. I no longer know the difference between the ocean blue and the starry sky. I no longer know the difference between the shadows behind and the mind that swerves and moves with the rhythm of the sound of the ocean.

At this moment of realization I find myself before an ocean of light and movement. I find myself at the shores at the edge of creation where dark and light are indistinct, where the depth of the ocean and the height of the heavens are one, where the suffering of my eternal existence and the joy of the presence of the beloved have become one, where death and life are movements of the same dance, where the external ocean and the inner ocean of light dissolve their boundaries.

I no longer fight her presence; for there is no one to fight, nothing to change, no distinctions, no boundaries, no real, no illusion, no me, no end––only the silent consciousness in the ecstasy of love eternal, radiant and beautiful.

 

The Light of far away Stars…

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 2 Comments

In the presence of this ocean, the inside and the outside have lost their boundary.

I see myself through ancient eyes: an immensity of sound and movement behind me. I see the odd alien old man sitting alone. His face, unmovable. His eyes, dead, reflecting the distant light of far away stars.

I move my hand towards the waters of the ocean, and for a moment I seem to almost touch the starry sky. The cold of the ocean of emptiness comes closer to my hand. I become afraid to go too far into the immense silence, afraid of being dissolved and devoured by the nothingness.

I withdraw, trying to remember who I used to be, where I used to go, the path I used to walk; trying to remember the name I used to have–the family, the friends, the name. The doing. The being. The day to day. The step by step I used to take. The orderly something that heeds this horribly beautiful ocean of blue. 

There is an Ocean…

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

There is an ocean I see with eyes of ancient memories, an ocean of a deep blue. The depth of the ocean feels exactly like the depth of my soul. The sound of the ocean comes hesitant at first, as if wanting to become present, real.

The gentle reverberations in the surface of the ocean are seen with the eyes and felt with the skin. It moves in soft rhythmic jumps. I sit at its shore feeling sand and pebbles under my feet, and every minuscule portion of sand appears to be complete unto itself; as if every particle of sand creates a unique sensation that travels through my body; as if I could get lost in every single sensation, and all of them are felt at once.

There is an ocean of deep blue. Its depth can be touched by the proximity of my hands. The closer I move my hands to my sightless eyes, the deeper I touch the profound stillness of this ocean. I sit as if waiting, but I don’t know what I wait for. I sit at the shores of this ocean. I hear the crashing of the waves, and each reverberation of the waves sounds as if it is my voice talking and moving and reverberating through the skin of my back.

I sit. For a moment, I do not know if I see the dark waters at the edge of time and creation or if, perhaps, I simply stand at the face of the abyss at the end of a life that I can no longer remember as being mine.

For a brief moment, the terrible thought begins to form that perhaps I do not know where I sit; that there is no ocean blue, no peaceful movement of waves; that perhaps all that is happening is the projection of my illusion of safety onto the immense, incomprehensible chaos––a non-existing nightmare that moves and reverberates, a darkness darker than black, a void, an emptiness that moves, an immensity such that the more I stare at it the more it looks towards me.

That look comes at me as a stream of sound, of words being thought by something flowing through me. I no longer know if these thoughts, these words, are flowing out of me or into me.

I Almost Remembered

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

I almost grasped one memory. I almost saw her tiny hand. It almost pulled me back to a place of belonging.

The closer the memory comes the farther away I seem to move. I try to relax. I lay down on my back. I open my eyes and I see the starry sky, beautiful in its immensity.

I look at the stars and the full moon pulling me; and the pulling of the full moon is gentle, and it pushes me at the same time. It grabs me with her arms of feminine beauty. It embraces me. It lifts me––or something that resembles that sensation of being me.

I look at this ocean of dark above with the tiny stars rippling like crests of waves in an impossibly big, impossibly old ocean of dark blue. The more I lay down the more I forget why I laid down in the first place. Why am I here? What is it that I’m trying to remember?

I do not know.

Moon Cities

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 3 Comments

Thus we searched for strange maps; maps which described not physical properties of the known world but the shadow world, wading not through accepted history, but through accepted mythology.

We sought the stories of the old ones. We recorded the lies told in prisons and mental institutions, guided by the sexual fantasies of the dangerously deviant, walking from dream to dream, recording every distortion: shadows that move within a blink, the dissolution of the world as we fall asleep, the dissolution of time as we begin to wake up.

Those became our stepping-stones. And madness. Yes, madness. Those were the definitions of our maps for a long, long time: lies, distortions, inaccuracies, old-wives tales, intentional lies, honest beliefs, and entertaining mythologies.

Songs and dreams, they created a vast wasteland, a desert made of sand. We started to chart the territories where this sand had congealed into miles and miles of glass, forming illusory cities made not of glass itself but of the reflection of the moon upon the glass.

 

She Falls In the Well

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

There is a well behind me, and the word well means nothing. It is silent. It contains meanings which are not. It contains familiar resonance. It contains the footprints of his sister jumping up and down, happy, cheering her brother playing baseball; jumping up and down not knowing that the wood has been weakened over many years of water and worms.

Dancing happily. Falling happily.

Surprise, fear, happiness mixing together as the pull of gravity fills to her loins as the flight of an angel falls down, pulled by this gravity well. The acceleration of the fall which came right after the utter happiness of cheering for her brother who is my father.

And she falls and she forgets. There is no time to think. The blood rushing to the head. The finding herself from world of light, watching the game––the ancient game of the gods––is still here buried deep in her head as she falls.

But now she is surrounded by the darkness, and this darkness moves at a very fast speed, rushing up at her. Joy, happiness, fear, surprise, awe, all mixed into one. No sequence of events. Just a rushing of the fall into the well of gravity to end in the dark waters, with no reflection, with no form, with nothing to create.

Is she then, my sister, my daughter, my mother? Is she there in this dark well fed with the dark waters that run underneath the surface? Is she there in the racial memory, in the silent background, always behind a thin veil of darkness awakening me, calling me beyond the veil?

Or is it my love and my desire for her what reaches out as a tendril from my belly and crosses beyond this veil of illusion and grabs her from her ankle, pulls her down from her life of light and joy?

Do I then bring her down through the rushing of light and matter? Or does she descend like the gentle starlight, flowing, descending through the emptiness of the void to fill up this vessel?

Does she descend gently and loving like dew drops; like the high pitched electrical vibration; like the ambrosia, the sweet nectar that descends from above and touches my tongue, filling my heart with the most sublime, soft, gentle love?

Is it just the mind that sits by the well in the full moon? Is it just this mind of mine, divided between thought and feeling? Is it just this silly divided mind that sees a difference between the graceful descent of the utterly tasty and satisfying dew of ambrosia and the rushing of the falling from grace?

The Old Well Is Behind Me

~ Koyote the Blind ~ Leave a comment

There is a well behind me. Old. It’s been there before the creation of the world. It’s been there before there were bricks and stones to put around it. It was there before there were any trees out of which wood was extracted and molded to cover it, to protect it, to keep little children from falling off into that darkness; before there was any thirst in the people and before there was any water, dark and silent, that could satiate such thirst.

There is this well.

What did it look like before we had words such as well, water, thirst? Did it look like a swirling of meaning––like the conglomeration of words and thoughts? Or was it a swirling of darkness dancing with a swirling of light, mixing, separating, always together, never ever nullifying one another?

What happened before the division of creation; before the separation of left and right; before the separation of male and female, of joy, and suffering; before life and death were distinct; before the dreaming and the waking became separate worlds?

How did this river, then, move from left to right when there is no left and no right? How did the waters flow? Were they dancing around one another without movement from here to there? Were they just shadows? Was the river and the well then––before the formation of the foundations of the world––one and the same?

And how would one go about crossing this river, I wonder? Would it be enough to sit here, stare at the crossroads, and force my eyes to see beyond the veil of creation; to see everything before me as a thin screen where lights and shadows create the illusion of a world of infinite space and infinite unending manifestation?

Could I at that moment simply see the world for what it is?
A thin membrane of words and hopes…
Seeing all plastered in front of me,
and reaching out not with the vision of the eyes
but the vision of the sensing that exists behind my head.
Reaching beyond the veil.
Seeking for a pathway.
A middle ground.
Seeking the way that you seek your way
in a dark moonless night.

There Is a Well Here

~ Koyote the Blind ~ 2 Comments

There is a well behind me––an old well. It has been covered by a layer of wood, also old; weakened by the constant rain and the salt that comes with the tropical wind. It has seen many years go by.

No one remembers why there is a well here, in front of these crossroads. There are no houses around. There is no settlement; no permanent resident in this area of the desert. We know from old maps that there is a river of water flowing through in front of me underground.

Sometimes I imagine the dark waters flowing from left to right. Silent. Not reflecting any light, for there is nothing to reflect. I wonder then if in the absence of the solar light this river of water perhaps reflects different shades of black.

And if it were to reflect different shades of black, who would be there to witness?

Behind me, there is a well. The well has been closed off for a long time. Unused, it is being fed by the silent waters––the dark waters. What kind of thirst, I wonder sometimes, are these waters meant to satiate?

I lend an ear to the rushing of the waters. I hear off in the distance the rustling of silent feathers. I close my eyes. I listen to the sounds of the world. They become unimportant. I listen to everything around me as I listen to the falling rain. Not one sound is more important than any other sound.

My thoughts… the constant stream of words and images and symbols, one following another, without any real meaning or logic to it. I sit here and I listen, and they flow from left to right. Moving inside me with no apparent truth in any single stream of thought; with not one image pulling me with it. I simply watch and observe the current that moves, and the lack of meaning in every sentence that is uttered does not deny the fact that there are different shades of non-meaning––different aspects of this unending stream of non-truth, of illusion.

One after the other they flow under the surface of my consciousness and I sit here and I listen for the rustling sound of silence behind the sounds of the world.

The sounds inside me become just as unimportant as the sounds around me. Suddenly, I feel myself immersed in darkness––darkness of light and darkness of sound, sustained in a space of infinite nothingness, only made trickled-reflections of passing tenuous light, lit by an ephemeral attention that is no longer focusing on anything in particular.