To say “it begins” presupposes that nothing was there to begin with, which is silly. Something, some One (or more) is always there to help set up, to unlock the door and turn the lights on. This applies in the Cosmos as equally as it does within your soul and in the lakefront solitude of this gentle hermitage.

The forthcoming non-beginning strings of words are recording events which begin on 11 March 2010, just north of the fluorescent decadence known colloquially as “Myrtle Beach.” I’ve not yet seen that place, but I tremble in fear of it, a bit. I have been told it’s a ghastly infection of the American condition on the shores of a great Mother Ocean who seems to tolerate lapping at the feet of distracted masses. At this moment, however, I’m in a very small yet completely harmonious cabin set within a vast “spiritual retreat center” which thrives in a very natural state. Rain keeps rhythm on the roof, and for the first time in some time, I’m left with nothing but time. This is a free and open space to think, heal, and contemplate the unwinding spool of string that is my body in transit through Everything. As I write this, a spider contemplates the window while I contemplate contemplation, and how it is I will go about reconciling the self this go ‘round. I slept some following this, I think.

I left the cabin, friendlily called the “Tree Room,” and went for the beach as the rain held back. I remembered in the very deep of my gut the heave of the Ocean, my truest home. As I wandered I considered a troubling battleground; how intellect requires doubt to sustain itself, while feeling requires trust that it may be healthy. It seems there is no clear path through these brambles which mediates these two ecosystems of consciousness. The narrow footbridge which crosses the lake is ample for now in both its steadfastness and gentle wobble. I will come back to this.

Regarding Myrtle Beach; I knew to expect overkill, but this was overkill on overkill. I passed a building which presumably was a theatre; it looked as if, amid the downpour, that the building had gone ahead and unabashedly smoked a motherlode of crack while it was waiting for its erstwhile audience. I sought out the safe haven of a restaurant among the brash, turgid hotels and condos, finally settling upon an Italian place, allowing Dean-O and Frankie to lull me into familiarity in this exciting, new alien landscape. Even the rain was unfamiliar, not a sweet mountain mist but the permeating breath of the Sea Goddess, who I one knew so very well. Walking back to the Tree Room from my first adventure, I found a toad who stood unfazed, a wide-eyed gatekeeper in this pregnant night. I could’ve passed him, unfazed myself, but rather I stood over him in awe, asking how I could be more like that still, aware and fully realized creature.

Sleep that night was a mixed bag of nutty dreams, of salad bars and swamp foxes (which I’m told skulk about the area). I had intended to sleep much more deeply, in that I’m constantly running a sleep deficit and had hoped to recover relaxation in my body and make up for lost dreams; it was fitful but at the very last I gained a somnolent finale. Now, I’m met with blue skies and sun, a celestial bargain following the drenching onslaught. In a few minutes, I will stretch, do some yoga, and prepare for a day’s worth of good, long quiet walking. I’ll be interested to know what I write next…

***

It seemed to take a while, this getting up of the oomph to go out, but once I did, the rewards were many. I think my hesitation comes from the prospect of having to interact with two-leggeds. They’re why I’m choosing the seclude here, wanting to be away from human interaction for a while. On the winding path to the beach, which crossed through matrices of vine and shadow, I came across a large turtle. She seemed to be on a wander from one pond to the other. I spent a few moments with her, amazed at the complexities of her shell as if somehow completely oblivious to the complexities of my own body. Yes, mine is a familiar skin, and perhaps the fascination has worn out. Obscuring our names, labels, and speciation, we are not different at all. We both occurred as such.

{So did sleep- occur that is. I felt that I had a lot to write but longed for a thorough sleep that my body has been needing, and I succumbed to nearly 12 hours of it. Some might say that is a waste of contemplative time; au contraire, it is an element I’ve been lacking, therefore making it more difficult to access the subtler regions of thought I need to enter. But back to where I was…}

The path to the beach was on either end bounded occasionally by dark waters, into which unseen things slipped as my footsteps sent ripples through the delicate environmental senses they possess yet we do not. Bubbles, swirls, these are all we are entitled to see of that world. How many other worlds co-exist that I don’t even notice, what effects do these have upon my sensory map that I overlook in my rambling? Countless. I cannot imagine the eyes fixed on me as I can barely fix my own eyes on any single spot, it’s all full of wonder. Up through the dunes to the beach- the Mother was not holding back, she was as dramatic as ever, more than just exercising a duty to make waves, but doing it with a little extra fortitude. Here’s paradox; a completely unspoiled, virgin terrain did I emerge from, yet standing distantly on either side of me are monstrous hotels, condos, edifices not so much as facing the ocean but challenging it. Tombstones, I thought. I sat, and listened to the in-breath and out-breath of the sea, absorbing the vibration into a body otherwise absorbed with time and things so far removed from natural. A body absorbed with the woe and misery of so many, a mind which is preoccupied with finding hope for these folks, yet is often too exhausted to find the honey for itself (or taste the honey it already has). The ocean wastes no times in healing, and lifting these things into the current, and dissipating them among the foam and arcs of waves.

I made for the pier. Since I was little, I always sought out some distant feature on the beach to walk to. While it’s cliché to say it, the feature in question was never the point, it was getting away from where I started. Then, it was the chatter of family. Now, it was simply to go deeper into unfamiliarity. For a buck, you can walk the pier, which was being battered and swayed by waves eager for sand. Blackbirds cackled, a few bored fishermen tried their luck, and I savored the silence, and the lack of necessity in making small talk. I can see why sailors of yore were a feisty bunch- the horizon yields nothing but mystery and ghosts of far off lands. It’s as inviting as it is potentially deadly, the perfect mix for sparkly and unreasonable eyes. There was a quiet restaurant at the base of the pier, where I likewise savored a mustard-laden bacon cheeseburger, fries, and two pints. I do believe that many would find this antithetical to contemplative practice. Again, I must say au contraire, it might just be a requirement.

I thought of dualism and monism, idealism and realism. I consider our foolhardiness in just opening our mouths, how a choice of word or belief cleaves away limitless tendrils of possibility just as a butcher cleaves away what once was a living body. I find that wrestling with the cosmological is of no less import than in wrestling with my inmost “demons.” In fact, the two are connected intimately. The indwelling opponent is the by-product of an inflexible and insatiable material world, the rewards of gravity and the reliability of things; from flesh to coins. The self that I strive ever more to be, ever more to radiate, knows that the world and life is little more than soup made of stars, and the things we covet and crave are as meaningless as thinly painting the image you see out the window on to the window itself. Instead, we are fed by the nameless; the undercurrent which gives sudden form to the formless, the whip of ‘gator tail, the laugh of gull, the skittering under a leaf, that dream of holding a lover, the act of reconciliation with the opponent and walking away wiser. The opponent is not the enemy of the soul, but rather the frictive force that gives the soul its moral shape by testing virtue’s resolve. I will always have an indwelling opponent, as we all do. In my time of healing, I gain strength from it, I tame it, I draw my boundaries firmer and ensure its territory is beyond the field of my actions and words.

By doing such, I also make cosmological reckonings; the material world is not the enemy of consciousness, but rather a symptom of it. Awareness gives shape and color; should I not be aware, what is a star? What is a desk? What is a self? It’s worth noting that our conception of the cosmological is not just human-centric (by the consciousness of our species), but it’s identity-centric, the ultimate trickle down theory. My concept of the Universe is not just tempered by how science or religion explains it, but by my own psycho-linguistic-perceptual filters. I don’t speak English, I speak Me-ish. You speak You-ish. The language of our tongue is just a rough enough translation that when you say “watch out!,” I know to jump. Yet simultaneous to your exclamation, my brain runs through every meaning of watch, and every meaning of out, and fits them into Me-ish by context of the snake about to bite, or whatever.

I can tell you about the brambles along the dunes, or the choir of young tree frogs singing in time with the ocean’s breath and the play of red-winged blackbirds, but what does this scene mean? Something completely different to each of us, but we conjure together to pull meaningfulness from it. The less aware we are, the more meaningless, vapid and stupid walking along a beach is, but we can describe it just fine. “I walked along a beach today.” The more aware; it becomes the most important thing we’ve ever done, though we can barely cough up an adjective to make sense of it. “The awareness that is I moved with the Universe at this particular geospatial juncture where elements perceived as separate clash and integrate with each other, during this knowingly illusory fragmentation people call linear time and material space.” It’s as if we live with one eye closed; we sublimate the vastness of our vision and experience in order to be understood. We limit input in order to navigate. How to open both eyes, really? I’m sure if we were to do this more than metaphorically, we’d disappear completely, in a flash… something both enviable and terrifying.

Humans are terrified, ultimately, of purposelessness. But the closer we get to understanding the physical states of matter, which appear as orchestrated slam-dances of energy, the less purpose it all seems to have than just to be. How do we get to fit within all that? We used to sing on our way to the beach “We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here!” which might just be as great an incantation to a cosmic “truth” as we’ll ever really get. Our desire for purpose or meaning gives social order and safety; it drives the machine of beginning and ending. The closer we get to fully accepting the great heaving mass that life and consciousness really is, the less and less useful social order and safety really is, as we fall out of that system and become its madmen, heretics, and heathens who just love being alive so radically that we’re not willing to cage it in institutions, words, or fields of study. We want very much to know it, yes, and know it deeply, we just know that our knowledge is very limited itself because it’s all written in Me-ish or You-ish and is therefore an infinitesimal fraction of how the Universe finds meaningful expression of Itself. The Universal language is the Universe itself. It is that it is, you are that you are, and everything in-between is some kind of flavorful filler we’ve added to make it that much more digestible. There’s no translation of this language; if you don’t speak it in one way or the other, you’re dead. The key is to become aware that you’re speaking it, and that the world around you has been articulately pronouncing itself for all time, and you’ve got just enough years to become barely conversational in the Universal language. Better to speak a smattering of it than none at all.

That being said, it’s time to go out again, and find something to eat.

***

Humans, let it be said, are weird, especially in our endless desire for entertainment and distraction. One such peculiarity is the pack mentality, that we need do damn near everything in terms of group versus individual will. For example, the culture of dining out is a major social phenomena. There are a few seconds of awkwardness when the index finger goes up and the lips pronounce “one.” At the Italian restaurant, the server hurriedly removed the opposite place setting, so I’d “have more room.” Room for what? If I’d needed that much room whilst dining with another we’d be in a pickle, eh? I am a somewhat in a world designed for pairs, or more. There are few cultural outlets for the free bird, the solo artist. Even here, in a place designed for solitude and contemplation, I’ve been asked many times whether I’ve done this group thing or that. No, I explain as tenderly as I can forfeit, I’m here for solitude, to not interact with people but to dissolve my own personhood into the moist soil and surrender ego to context just as fungus digests the fallen leaves. Being a short-term hermit is not an outcasting or an antisocial enterprise; rather, it is acting upon the hunger of the soul to know its source, to concentrate via whatever tools it has to work with upon the rudimentary questions that cannot be answered when in the scuttle of social hullaballoo.

I soloed my way through a 3D documentary about the International Space Station at the Imax theatre, then through a round of pollo molé and Dos Equis. Prior to this, I walked along the beach, just because. I was exalted by the play of gulls, the strong wind that made the sand dance as auroras, by the random flotsam that found its way to these shores; a twist of nautical rope, shells within shells, a brittle and bleached old bone. What graceful remnants; if only we could be some careful to leave such beauty in our wake, rather than the plastic that remarks to the discoverer “hey, I consumed something!” Everything else rots, and rightly so, except that which we make or plunder. We refuse to allow the spoils of our civilization to just go away, as if thumbing our noses at time, to succumb to the decay that is gnawing at our feet second-by-second. If anything is gleaned from our excesses by the fantastical future, let it be that we were an insecure culture. Even our gods were plastic.

Sleep beckons. See, there’s entropy again.

***

While asleep, I time traveled. In a sense, it’s “Spring Forward” day and rather suddenly an hour slipped away. Dreams are always weird things, never routine. But last night was weirder, complete with cats sneaking into my cabin that were incarnations of the Master, collectively (it’s been said he will appear to folks here from time to time. A friend of mine thought his wife was wearing a Frank Zappa mask but alas, it must’ve been someone else). There was something else about a sombrero, but that’s all I’ve got. In a bit, I’ll pack up and return the Tree Room to it’s me-less state, and make one last time for the beach, to pay my kind regards to such a dear and eternal friend. When I was half-asleep there the other day, post-cheeseburger, my mind playing with the dream-world as a kid toes the tide, I thought that I could peacefully and happily die in front of the sea, that if I had a choice (many decades away, mind you), that’s where I’d slip away. To think of the elderly pilgrims who make their way to the Ganges who, once upon her banks, seem to turn off like a switch with little fanfare. Not only are the enlightened not fearful of death, they tame it, know it, just as I have sought to know and tame the indwelling opponent. I admire that self-control… this time though, I was thrilled to be alive and present before such a great power, even as the sun lulled me into a reverie.

Have I achieved what I came here for? I could best answer that if I fully knew why I was here. I think my primary thrust was a strong dose of inner peace, and a quieting of the constant self-doubt which tends to make me either more hesitant or emotionally awkward. Yes, then, I think I’ve achieved these points. Am I healed? Insofar as I acknowledged the wounds and allowed them to be dressed by either my own will or the weed-like creeping in of the natural forces which slip in through the holes in our souls and take root, making a balm from the inside-out. Fairer to say, I’m healing versus healed; there are many places on and within that need a balm, and I’ve had to choose the most critical functions of the soul and heart first. But I’m coming away with a hefty bit of contemplation, something my life allows little time for. For this, and for the Tree Room, for the turtles and ‘gators and laughing gull, I’m so grateful. Today, I’ll go to a sculpture garden as the grand finale of stimuli, but certainly not the final overture of this way of thinking.

And so the journey ends, but certainly not the Work…