Trip with me, won’t you?
These are images of Galaxies from NASA’s Hubble telescope.
There are trillions of stars in some galaxies with over 100 billion galaxies in the known universe.
Hello everything!
a Flash of Objectivity
If we’re lucky, we get a handful of moments in life where some seemingly mystical, random combination of circumstances converge around us, and we’re suddenly capable of true objectivity; of feeling and seeing and being at one with our place in the universal order of everything and everyone, of our place in line with everything and everyone that’s gone before us, and all that will come after, of how insignificant we are and yet how extraordinarily important we are.
Regardless of where or when they happen for me, when they happen for me, I’m insanely aware of everything and, simultaneously, of nothing.
Regardless of where or when they happen for me, when they happen for me, I’m able to realize the bounds of my utter impermanence, the bounds of my life and its utter insignificance in relationship to everything else but how I’m somehow an integral part of the physical space I occupy, on this physical land, on this physical continent, on this physical planet, in this physical galaxy, and how this physical galaxy is part of billions of other physical galaxies in our physical universe. To recap, while in Flash, I’m aware that I’m nothing while at the same time my nothingness is part of everything else that’s, at the same time, something and nothing.
Suggestion: Perhaps you should take a hit of pot because I’m only half way through the set up of this piece.
That’s what’s happening in my mind on/in Flash, but there’s a body-centric component of being on/in Flash, too.
My body doesn’t end, it blends, it merges, it is subsumed by the air around me. What I’m seeing is somehow not coming in through my eyes, it’s already inside me and I’m looking out through it, as part of it. For me, these Flashes of Objectivity almost always occur when I’m out in nature and when they happen, without exception, wind and light and sound pass through my body as if I had no mass. Instead of giving resistance or being impenetrable to wind and light and sound, my body seems to no longer exist as something separate from everything else.
During these Flashes of Objectivity, I am gone from what I know of myself and I’ve become part of everything else.
This type of transcendence is what the monks are capable of when deep in meditation or prayer. Surely, this is what drug addicts’ seek to control the repeat of. Surely, this is what it’s like to merge with all life forms, and with God.
You want more of everything, don’t you? Me too! I went and got us more of everything from the internet! More of everything is right here!
I have memories of those Flashes coming to me as early as 8 or 9 years old – while fishing, while riding my boy’s bike with a banana seat and cherry picker handle bars (I was gender fluid before we knew what it was!) – but I couldn’t describe them until I got into my teens.
In my late teens, I had one of my longest sustained Flash. Not surprisingly, a Fiat was involved.
I’ve always been a loner and one day, I drove my bright yellow Fiat X19 out to the Ten Cent Bridge where I parked on the sand just a few feet from the water’s edge, and I laid on the hood and watched the clouds float by.
Dolphins came to breathe with me, for me. Fish burbled to announce themselves, then jumped to show off for me. Waves lapped the shore trying to get to me. Heavy wet hot air carried the trace elements of the water that couldn’t quite get on me, and that heavy wet hot Florida air surrounded me with salt that left grit in my nostrils as I took it, with every breath, into my lungs. That heavy wet hot Florida air carried the grit of salt into my ears, and all through my waist length blonde hair. Bumble & Bumble, you’re a poser. The sun baked my skin, it heated my body from above and it came for me from underneath by heating the hood of my car beneath me. As I laid there in complete willful sacrifice and with the power of eternal nature surrounding me, I was being environmentally birthed, swaddled and nursed.
Halle-fucking-lujah!
Today is Election Day in America. What a shit show.
I haven’t attended any rallies, I don’t talk politics, I did watch the debates but not for the same reasons most people might.
Yesterday, I walked the downtown waterfront and just so happened to arrive at my turn around point, the Dali Museum, just in time for a Joe Biden/Jimmy Buffett “get out the vote” rally in a waterfront park.
I’m still a loner and I had no intention of going to the rally – it was full of the dreaded “other people” – but I wanted to hear what the Vice President had to say, and who isn’t up for a little Jimmy? So I stood along the seawall railing just across the water from where the rally was being held and there, I fell into Flash and stayed there for I don’t know how long.
When I came out of it, I took pictures of the sky.
When I came out of it, I took pictures of the waterfront.
When I came out of it, Jimmy was singing this:
And with that, I stretched out my tight hips using the railing you see in the foreground of the marina shot, and as I draped my body over that railing, I released myself into the 12 knot wind and it took everything I don’t need and it brought me everything I do.
God Bless America.
God Bless You.