Awake

Maybe you need to be okay with four in the morning and seven dogs out in the Georgia countryside. Maybe you need to be blessed by your father's death and the fact that you get to live out all of what he never got, and maybe the heat of this evening has nothing to do with why you can't sleep. You may give all that is in you and never get what you think that you should. This is not the end of the world. This is quite the opposite. It is the beginning.

You have never shot guns at roadsigns or ran people of another color out of your little countryside. You have never settled in these hills and lived off the land and bent trees to show others in your tribe how to get to water. You have never been separated from the pack and howled so the others could hear you. Or have you? What makes you think that you might be able to predict the future?

There is an ocean of blessings with your name written on the surface and yet you fill only a bottle. You come to the mouth and quit because you don't know how to drink salt water. You are a cow without knowledge, a bowing sow of iniquity, a manatee at best, living within the chains of infamy. I may say this is tomfoolery, words spilling at four in the morning, but you know about the golden thread that runs through everything and will sew all of them together if only your eyes are open.

What about your ideas? What about everything that falls? What about everything that exists within the soil that is fed by all that falls and the fact that you have been sitting around waiting for something to rise, waiting to be noticed, afraid that you are not like him or her. You ARE NOT like him or her. There can be only one you. This is what is beautiful: you and the world exist within one another. You are the world and the fly and the grass and each peach pit and the cyanide inside that even a horse knows enough to spit out. You are alive. Yet you are not the you that cannot stop thinking. You are the you that wonders why can't I stop thinking like this.

Revel in this. Those you have met that have met those that have been affected by those you met before meeting them. It is a tongue twister of connection you damn well better serve with reverence for the tree, reverence for the bird, reverence for the leaf that drops, the leaf you touch, the stem, your eyeballs and the book she pulls off the shelf and tells you, "I think you should read this."

Listen to all you meet, especially those that you do not agree with for they are showing you a side of yourself that you cannot see. Listen and read, but most importantly, touch, get down on your knees and look at what is beneath your feet, crawl back into the ocean, realize that you are the sun. You are the receded water, the seed, the one celled being that once lived only in water.

What a mystery, not knowing where the spirit that has always been there goes when someone dies. What a gift to be able to imagine it to be anything that you want it to be. Like god. Like that man you met years ago, that man that was yourself, that man that knew there was no way out but refused to stop fighting. That man that then asked for help. Who and what is god? Not you.