A Celestial Wonder
An attempt to capture with words the most beautiful voyage I’ve ever taken
“We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.”— Carl Sagan
Is this a celestial dream?
Or is this reality?
I shut my eyes,
and see the universe,
in infinitely intricate waves, vibrations, pulses.
From the beginning of time until the end,
all at once and none at all.
“Colors” is too narrow a filter,
too small a word,
to cover the spectrum which now lay before me.
The music,
it dissolves me -
my lines, my shape,
where my body ends and it begins.
I was in the music.
I was the music.
I am the music.
The vines dance a delicate dance,
of expansion and contraction,
growth and decay.
An unhurried groove with virtuous abundance,
choreographed to the beats of the universe.
These walls are alive,
they always have been.
In them contain sub-atomic, quantum realms
of monumental proportions.
A narrative of consciousness, the cosmos, and its creation,
revealed
in a simple shifting of shapes.
“But of course!” I mumble to myself,
and chuckle
at the absurdity of it all.
Boundless laughter, cries, anger and sadness,
course through my fleshly body.
Every sentiment from every sensory experience
that has ever been had,
is captured and contained into a point
that explodes and implodes onto itself,
and manifests itself in tears and sweat.
I see my mother, my father, my eleven year old self,
my lover, my brother, my sister, my grandparents.
I see you,
and weep for our shared joys and sufferings;
and forgive.
There is so much.
There is more than enough,
just sitting in my god damn bed.
To distill such a journey
into mere words or paintings,
is to strip it of its energy and essence.
The vocabulary does not yet exist,
and those that do fall so far short.
Yet, art, music and nature occur,
as an untended bridge —
an honorable attempt to
connect our waking life to this wondrous state
of awareness, being and unconditional love.
But the voyage is long and arduous,
the bridge at parts broken.
To travel by foot is to sit in silence,
for hours, days, months, years -
it is not the way for the weary or inexperienced.
A vehicle exists,
one that travelers before me have taken,
that can traverse the bridge at warping speeds.
It leaves me nowhere and everywhere,
with nothing and everything.
It is where I want to go,
where I’ve always been,
and where I’ll one day return.
Truth, is the only thing I’m able to bring back:
The world I live in
is not the only one.
The body I have,
is not the only one.
I,
am not only I.
Change, is the only thing I know for certain -
a Truth that rests above all others.
Where is its beginning and what of its end?
An elegant mystery of our universe,
all the more exquisite when left to be.
For when I try to observe and extract it into earthly terms,
it is no longer there.
We are but a small piece of the cosmos,
gazing upon itself in wonder of its existence.
