What remains?
When the glass shatters,
When the bubble finally bursts,
Right after the mind-bending,
Soul-crushing Ego Death.
When he who has steered the ship
For most of what memory can offer,
Is forced to walk the plank,
Who’s the captain now?
脑海 (nǎo hǎi). This is the Chinese word for “mind.” It’s made up of two characters: 脑, which means brain, and 海, which means ocean or the sea. I doubt there’s a more appropriate metaphor for the mind than this—the ocean in our brains.
What remains is this,
The vast ocean,
With all its sounds,
And currents,
And waves, and life,
And possibilities.
With every firing synapse,
Thunder.
For every core memory
Dropped from the shelves,
Tsunami.
In between breaths,
Between action and rest,
Only stillness.
They say the best way to learn how to swim is to just jump in. As a teacher of life’s most useful lessons, there’s nothing quite like the awareness of the real possibility of our slow or sudden demise. Only a few, if any, are more effective.
Eighteen feet above the crashing waves
Doesn’t seem so high a point, until
You find yourself at the very edge.
Don’t look down, eyes on the horizon.
Distance slows to a halt, time thickens,
Air moves farther and farther away.
For a second,
You hold on to the false belief
That you had anything to lose.
And then you don’t.
My good friend says it’s more difficult to stay underwater than it is to stay above it. Even free divers strap weights to their torsos to keep them submerged for longer stretches of time. It’s a whole new world down there. And yet, here we are, treading our legs off to stay afloat.
Pause in mid-air but only for the inhale.
Let gravity pull you back to reality,
Momentum pushes,
Buoyancy with the catch.
Navy blue, bubbly white, and the deep cold.
Converse with temptation, the same one
With the invitation to stay under.
Ask your questions, know thyself,
No die, self.
Heavy weightless, sudden painless, notice
The yellow and dark stripes on your arm
Dancing with the ripples above,
Slow-motion, still life.
Heightened senses, complete nothingness
Around your twenty-meter radius. Notice
This is not the end.
How deep is the brain ocean? As deep as we allow it to be. How far can we swim in it? As far as we allow ourselves to see. How long can we stay under? Only until the next breath.
The body sheds off the old aura,
The one built, fed, groomed, nurtured
By everyone but it. The cool drift lingers.
The sun’s gravity pulls and whispers.
Rise now, awaken, breach, breathe.
The kid is dead, but you’re still here,
Baptized by the salty swells.
Light saturates, sound waves catch up.
The ocean is the same ocean.
The sun is the same sun.
The air breathes the same.
Reintroduce yourself. Welcome.