A Privilege from the Gods

…

I’ve waded through the filth and sludge…

I’ve forded the swamps and still wetlands of humanity and time and existentialism.

I’ve laid waste to the heaviness of friendship, love, and expectations to “free” myself.

I’ve looked, determined, toward a horizon beyond bent and knotted trees, toxic and densely dark waters, and gloomy, rain-soaked skies.

Just looking to find an unveiling sun.

…

Yet, humanity still solicits to and distracts me, time still dismisses me, and the existential still injects its toxins to both my body and brain.

Why this?

Why me?

What have I missed?

…

It’s been a determined and persistent adventure, this way.

I’ve searched for the sacred, trusted in my compass, and slayed endless monsters.

But…

I’ve slowed to an unbearable trudge.

Moving for the sake of movement.

Trusting only hope.

No context or compass left.

Only motion.

It seems that the fine line between hope and hopeless has blurred.

Is it desperation now? Is it flaunting and flailing, undirected chaos now that makes me move?

…

I’m seduced by the entertaining idea to let myself pause.

Pause…and sink.

To let the warm, suffocating sludge of the bottoms take me.

Exhaustion feels so good now. It feels welcoming. Truthful.

A letting go that leads to a satisfying dark unconsciousness in which I feel reprieve from the gooey gothic hell in which I’ve been wading.

I’m bitter.

Bothered.

And the inebriating idea to just close my eyes, and let it all go, is like a Siren’s whisper in the sticky, heavy air.

…

Maybe I’ll just rest.

Maybe if that sturdy stone to my left could only hold me.

Hold me with it’s gritty sandpaper-like roundness, just for a moment.

Just long enough to let time find me again.

To let stillness help me choose between the obvious: forward uncertainty or definitive, satisfying surrender.

Is this psychosis?

…

And in it’s firmness and chilly, bloodless touch, I at least find a soothing stability.

And nothing more can be found in clutching this stone than that.

That…and the choice to choose…just…nothing.

It’s this nothing that is creating some satisfying, odd paradox.

That here, in pause, the only thing to do, to be, is nothing.

Just consciousness without compass.

Life without demanding functionality.

Is this the surrender? Is this the intoxicating end?

Is this the final wash of darkness that blesses me with the infinite unconsciousness?

…

Here in the pause though, after the ache of forever catches up with me and blaring silence of stillness becomes almost unbearable…

I start to feel warm among a stuffy, and bitter atmosphere.

A smoldering spark persists in my center.

Just a burn. Not a flaming arrow, but an unextinguishable burning candle.

A manifestation, an undeniable catalyst of the still pause.

An undying remnant to my now seemingly foggy oath to myself.

…

Then the burning wick irritates an instinct to hear a summons from my soul.

To take my deepest breath, open my eyes wide, and look to the heavens.

An opening then emerges…

Not of a blinding hot sun, but of a clear black, speckled sky.

…

And I’ve realized something.

I’ve chosen to be here.

To stay and fight on level grounds.

This middle-Earth is only a layer.

A level of progress…and a very intoxicating plain of perpetuity.

A chosen Hell.

Even intention and conviction can lead me astray, it seems.

I was so forward, so in time itself, so obsessed with my own humanity and what it looks like on landscape, I lost sense of the three-dimensional world in which we all exist, at all times.

Heaven, Hell, and Mother Earth.

…

And the middle-Earth has me captured.

Looking back and front, around at all things that are only cerebral, absolute, and mundane.

It’s in the sky, that I find my etherial self.

My godlike, sacred, and heroic self.

It’s in the sky we feel and accompany the soul and heart and something no reality can compare.

…

And as my crusty and clenched fist timidly stretches into the freeing reach of raw liberation, the gloom around me parts more willingly.

And I start to see more than the blackness, more than the speckling of scorching stars.

I see the gods themselves, and the clarity of the universally undeniable.

Galaxies and space dust and endlessness.

The playground of divinity and esoteric wisdom.

…

My reach is unknowingly, startling received.

By the invisible squeeze of something familiar.

Familiar and almost…psychedelic.

Now I see.

I see.

…

They were waiting for me.

Waiting for me to get over myself, my image, my self-seeking personification of art and existence.

It was me that parted the skies.

It was always me.

It always will be me.

…

We must trek between lands as humans.

It will always be in the individual choosing power of everyone on this Earthly plain to part the skies and levitate into the realms of ethereal skies and sink past the gates of Hellscape, to collect the pieces of ourselves.

Seeking wisdom and aim.

….

Now, I rise away from the level ground.

With not even my own power, for I have no wings.

Only by the choice to look up without expectation and without my ego, pulled into the skies by those ever-watching omnipotent beings.

And still…

knowing I must return to here.

Return to Hell even.

And pay homage and give respect to the necessary journey between these worlds.

…

This is the privilege of the gods.

Those that seek to guide us, if only we submit to the truth.

That we must ground ourselves to the world we live in, be bold against the monsters of the Underworld, and have humility in the face of the divine.

The internal, eternal divine.

…

I stepped into a new space this weekend.

A new Barnes and Noble here in Idaho.

Maybe it was just my morning coffee, or maybe there is something truly emotionally etherial when you choose to exist in a certain moment.

There’s nothing more daunting yet intoxicating than walking into a conglomeration of unfathomable knowledge, wisdom, peace, and intention.

…

I don’t know if anyone will really every know how revolutionary and how long-standing the effects are from literature.

Written out, permanent ideas that can’t escape unless physically destroyed. I guess that’s probably deep love of peeled layers to which I over most material things I desire a personal library of the ever-expanding universe of the written word.

…

I’ve somehow passed from desperate need to know all things, to a semi-quenched awe and contentment with being saturated only by the works that I choose most passionately.

It’s a default among psyche, at least it seems today, that we drift right over the beauty in such things as this.

Where people see only shelves of product and capital gains, and a unsupportable bookstore charging too much for paperbacks or not making considerate economic or wrong political decisions…

…

All I see is soul.

I see both God and gods here.

I see the peak of artistic creativity, the most intentional of us who decide to seek, question, idolize, and manifest what humanism is all about. It’s what I would call a privilege from the gods.

It’s calling. It’s internal divinity.

It’s the choice to create while facing all your fears of communal exile(self-inflicted?) and alienation. To face loneliness, indifference, and no matter what you do based on your morality and selflessness, having a social landscape that turns away from you.

The path to the gods is often a lonely one.

At least in the beginning.

Just as the assumed Western god created the heavens and the Earth, this he did alone, until he intentionally created the first two people, made from his image. Those two people that loved and understood their creator…the same way that as you create, you find the ones that love and understand you as wall.

As many years as I’ve avoided it, this is the only standing answer to what it takes:

We must first go alone.

We must wander past the city walls and into the realm of monsters by ourselves. Not because we are skilled and comfortable, but because we know we are not. To know that the only thing we can trust is that we can survive what comes. And that what comes is where we gain skill and wisdom.

There is nothing else.

And we much reach out and up to do so.

It must be a visualized and spiritual faith to walk out raw and ready to make risky and uncomfortable decisions.

Only then will divinity, god, or something more spiritual reach back to your out-stretched fingers, and help pull you toward your purpose, your duty, your reason to be here.

Truth and Love, Reader.