Sea Shanty

Twice now, in about a week, I’ve had a hit of bliss. Unrelated to narcotics, psychotics, or erotics, I’ve bumped into the tiniest little bit of atomic (is sub-atomic smaller?) presence, a little whiff of right now, a potent unmistakable thimbleful of glimmering terra incognita, the devoutly to be experienced rapture of how it is when it’s not everything else that usually covers up how it really is.

Does this make sense? Do you get what I mean? I mean, every now and then, when I’ve given myself (or found and taken, or bumped into quite accidentally) some space, I have found heaven on earth. A nirvana in a nano-second that explodes into a full-blown and multi-dimensional experience of time outside time, so sensually real and cellular that all mysteries are explained and questions answered.

Stepping out a door into a spring morning, two blocks from the Pacific, beneath a canopy of magnolia shadows, I inhaled—quite inadvertently, I do it all the time—and received with the breath a complex sensual message of faultless, wise beatitude, a firm and fixed sense of the rightness of it all. Not at all vague, but grounded, concrete, so very real that, in fact, it took the next breath quite away.

And there it went. I kissed it as it flew by, me and William Blake both. And the world as it is otherwise settled around me again, pushing down with a modicum more pressure than it did in that gorgeous, weightless second.

I kneow enough (how lovely to have lived long enough to for this) to let it go. There is in me an undeniable urge to grasp it and pin it down (catch it, kill it, laminate it, firmly and forever keep it within reach), as I have tried to do that for many, many years.

But, ha! I didn’t even consider it, but cupped my hands immediately and gave thanks for the joy even as it winged away, streaking in another direction at an unearthly speed of much, much more than c ( a mere 299,792,458 metres per second).

We are wired with such infinitesimal detail, such absurdly perfect potential. And barely, only now and then, when we’re least expecting it, do we really know it. Or do anything about it.

I have wept and I have laughed, and I love them both the same.

Th-th-th-that's all for now.