Diving Bells and Butterflies

The flat, fluorescent morgue light in Melbourne train carriages must be made by people who do not believe there is anything beyond death. The light is an insult to God, an insult to candlelight, a failure of imagination, making corpses out of commuters.

This evening I find life in the life and the death of Jean-Dominique Bauby on my screen and I remember again what I keep forgotting. I forget it all in a few blinks of an eye. Bauby wrote an entire book on one eyelid blinking. Sometimes I wish and yearn for death but it is not a wishing and a yearning for death, but for real life. The deepest deaths are the ones we die a million times every day while we live.

I sit in front of an empty page and the void is what drives people to drink but only if you don't think there's anything beyond the void. Sometimes, maybe only for a second, I see it, a taste through my eyes. Lightbulbs encase the sky; yellow suns nod on green stalks, flooding Rumi's field.

I stretch and I bend, creak through four rounds of salute to the sun. It gives me a headache. Salute to the sun is really meant to be only a warm-up for the rest of the yoga postures you do after that. This evening, it is the whole shebang. There is wisdom in not dislocating your entire body on the sharp spike of your ego.

Sometimes, when I am taking care, I notice some of the millions of lives I am born to every day. It's all moving too fast, and I note what I can, but so much is lost. Still, I keep walking out on piers I cannot see because the footing is more sure walking into the void than it is sometimes walking into the street.

Sometimes I think that You are going to turn the world inside out, the way children do that horrible thing with their eyelids. That one day we are going to wake up somewhere else and the beating, gentle, pink desires that were all aborted in one world, that never saw their way past enclosed hearts, will beat out into the world, over and over, and we become the children we never even were when we were young.

I can not imagine what life is when there is no death to frame the picture.