Perhaps we imagine that you are one to subscribe to illusion. Let's say, although you can't quite prove it, you have this feeling. This urge. This thing in your heart that says time exists. For now, let's hold that belief up and into the light. Let the sun shine upon it, as would the sun shine upon the ass of a garden gnome.
The sun will shine on any ole thing, it doesn't care. It just gives.
Here is the moment, you will remember later, where you went to roll your eyes but realized quickly, you do not have eyes.
Well now, this is peculiar, you think quietly. Time exists.
Let you think for a bit. Now that you have your measure, how long is the calculation? How many times have you spiraled around the sun? What is your sum? Although some will surely argue, as acts of consciousness are apt to do, you'll say five hundred million.
Seems reasonable.
Five hundred million times. Five hundred million years you have been here. Does this mean you have been here five hundred million times, the entire time? That sounds about right, as opposed to sounding wrong, if you were to suppose you had the auditories to surmise the mechanical wave propagation of right and wrong. At what pitch does right change to wrong? Which note lies in the middle, torn between two worlds? Here is where you try compassion: those poor frequencies.
Please forgive you. You are new to this time thing and you have some questions.
Is this a long spell?
Are you late for something?
Or right on time?
Let you get this straight: there was a Big Bang thirteen-point-seven billion years ago and some say it is your father? Or mother? Or god? If anything, the properly conceived forum could declare it your beginning.
Feelings on beginnings are like water borrowed from the ocean, but the ocean forgot all about the transaction.
You have no idea where that came from. But, you reckon, it had to come from somewhere.
What's the difference?
What's the same?
No, really, you're serious here. You want to understand this. Let you get this straight: you're saying it was all infinitesimally small? A universe in the opposite direction? All of everything that was inside of nothing? Simultaneously the heaviest and lightest thing that was ever...well, ever?
And then it just decided to expand?
You call this science?
There must be some shape beyond comprehension, you figure. If you could scratch you would scratch your back, if you had one.
Perhaps you should bring it closer to home, keep things simple. Try attaching to nostalgia. There are those who find memories helpful. They say connecting through story is the best way, the way to connect yourself to what you will now know as Past and Future.
Well ok. You'll give it a go.
Be careful here, but not afraid. There are some rules. For example, you should consider that some memories stick out more than others. Within whispers, they remain forever present. Closer. As if constructed then anchored to the essence of you, to the bedrock, to the fundamentals composing those mysterious parts. Memories as doorways on the side roads of forever.
To relate; it probably seems like only yesterday that you were 7500 feet below the earth's surface. Here is where you ask yourself, what is a yesterday?
How can it seem so close? These moments where you felt the drops of new strata upon you, each year a new ring of surface upon the earth, each decade a chapter in a novel where a subterranean castle imitates a tree trunk.
Where is the eye blink upon which 300 million years is measured?
Why so much anthropomorphization? Is that really necessary?
You ask carefully, not trying to be defensive. Somewhere, someone is impressed with your pronunciation.
I got it?
Can you still sense the water above you? The ages of sea dividing this continent for as long as there were two moons. The inland waterways that slowly buried you so that you could be. Maybe you tell yourself, this is how you understood that you must first become someone before becoming no one.
You say out loud, with our without contempt: here is where the accumulation of knowledge does not necessarily beget the becoming of wisdom.
Do you remember the sense of humor that crept upon you? Of how some one or some thing seemed to be fucking with you? Your circuitry felt it needed to build a vehicle for irony, so that it could infect through affect. A laugh to make a laugh. Naturally, you couldn't help but chuckle when an ancient sea of water became an ancient sea of grass. No one can blame you for that.
Still makes me laugh.
Do you see how it blows?
Do you hear how it sounds?
Forgive you, for you digress.
Perhaps you recall the week you began to rise? Of course, how could you forget? On most good days, especially crisp autumn cycles, you can still feel the dense rumble beneath you. The collision of skin. The remaking of internal organs. Atoms just being atoms: attract and repel.
Pacific Ocean floor meets North American continent. You can almost hear someone make the original throat clearing sound. The first-ever attempt at manners. Is this seat taken?
Now we seem to be getting somewhere.
Could have fooled me.
You could giggle now when you think of it, maybe even chortle-snort out loud; how the upward bulge made you feel, like some birth of a future with a massive head, like some momentum that would not stop, could not stop, but wanted to. Even now you remember the magma coming from deep below, meeting oxygen and implanting the initial questions.
Are you blood?
What are you taking?
What are you giving?
For twenty million years you were the heart of a mountain. How many can say that? No one can take that away from you. Go ahead, call them your golden years. Here is where you feel something well up inside.
You repeat this three times; those were my golden years.
Then you met Erosion. That loving, caressing, sucking son of a bitch. At first it felt as if he took those 7500 feet away from you, stole them, left you without. You were at the center of a 15,000 foot mountain range, a position of nobility, of sacredness.
Now that you've loved, you've learned the bi-polar hunger of sacredness.
You've learned that Erosion was not taking. He was shaping. Nurturing. Revealing new layers. You allowed him to show you the sky, that new surface, and you marveled. Luckily, as you have no ability to blink, you began to design your code to mirror the change from night to day, day to night, that defining hour within which the end gives to the beginning, depositing a shape that is a turning. A color that can not be seen. But why must you see?
What color is enlightenment?
What shade is the comfort of exposure?
Upon which spectrum falls the delight in vulnerability?
How fun it is to imagine what you thought you could not imagine. How she is a collection that has come to study herself through the study of you. How fun it is to watch her fail and see it work on her, to see the way redefinition can open and widen and nourish. How hilarious it is to gaze upon variations of code and their decided dramas over which one is best.
How astounding it is to notice the way she can walk the length of her inner canyon and still find new tributaries, new valleys, new peaks and remote species.
How can this be?
Five hundred million years. Of sky opening then closing. Of steady dissection. Of unfailing rotation. And now, her. Finally, you think to yourself, a chance to love ourselves.
Here is the part you tell yourself, over and over. Here is the home you were to never find. Here is the box unopened. Here is the caterpillar choosing to stay.
Why is being one thing an extravagance toward the being of the whole?
You wish you could understand yourself.
Today is now, you imagine. Today is when she comes to you and moves upward. She has come to move from one world to the next. Easily. Exquisitely. If you were to design a proper equation to give this day its speech, you'd somehow include a paragraph about the instructions deep inside of her. The same four letters that they all share.
And you'd decide, after much deliberation, that Rhythm is the DNA of Past meeting Future, giving birth to Now.
Here she is, halfway up your center. She engages. Her breath is not breath. Her sequence is not sequence. She is nothing but a mirror, an action of molecules fueled by chaos beckoning order, a rising and an efficiency made possible through peaceful evolution. A river moving, never accumulating, never ending.
If you had tear ducts you would cry, if you knew what crying was. You ask yourself, how else can this be released?
Who are you to remember?
Who are you to hope?
Who are you?
Who are you?
Perhaps we imagine that we are one to subscribe to illusion.