Lakeside on March 1st

At long last the tidal wave was over and I slinked out of my girdled mind like the inner body of a snake escaping its tight, battered skin.

Oh sweet newness on this warm day - this first day of a new month which swaddled me babe-like in a blanket of sunshine.

Hints of meringue swirled and whirled gently in the air, and orange peel seemed to curl around me, bringing the promise of bloom from this blueness.

They say we ought to process things and we think when we are told this that the process cannot be worse than the original wound, but it is.

Why so? Because processing comes with the salt of realization and it gets its sharp, glass-like crystals right into the flesh, down deep to the bone and my god you have to sit there with it searing through you like an ice-flame through the soul.

The process is a cruel mistress and she’ll rip at the stitches of the wound you’d sewn up in a panic to stop the bleed and it will flow and flow and flow.

But once it flows - once the pain subsides there is an absolute moment of clarity. Not an easy clarity, but an important one, that lets you see everything for what it was and what it is - past and present, self and other, love and loss.

Then comes the great pour from the source of this clarity - yes a water-torrent of moments that shape-shift in the light, appearing first as drops of recollection and then as a great stream of recognition - for there is a vast gulf between that which you recollect in a blur and that which you recognize in sharp resolution.

This gathering is called the bigger picture and it merges all these tiny droplets into a vast lake that is both bitter and sweet.

And you can look at yourself in this lake and see yourself and others reflected clearly in it - the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This deep reflection which may seem like the surface, has taken you years to arrive at but you’re here now - standing lakeside at the destination of naked facticity.

You see, when you swim in the rocky sea of delusion, there is no movement you can achieve other than floundering at best and drowning at worst, but by this calm, cool lake in the spring sunshine there is Truth, there is Peace, there is Hope.