Spark

...on the threshold

Something has gone terribly, completely wrong. You know it, don’t you?

We live in a world of wonder—this is the best time in history to be alive. You don’t have to die from a toothache or a splinter now. We have conquered so much and bend nature to our will. We understand the fundamental rules of the universe. Elements of logic, cause and effect, and scientific thinking are now taught to children. So much is so right.

The collected knowledge of humankind is at our fingertips, and that knowledge has grown beyond measure. We can now safely mock the primitives who thought thunder and lightning were the acts of gods. We no longer tremble in fear of the monsters who lurk just outside the light of our campfires.

Our artifice would dazzle any human from a previous generation. Consider the device upon which you read these words. How easy is it to reach across the globe and speak to anyone, anywhere—the world in the palm of your hand.

It's clearly the best time to be alive. But even with all that, don’t you sense that something has gone horribly wrong?

It’s probably best to avoid thinking such thoughts because we are inevitably led back to the idea that maybe what has gone wrong is inside us. Maybe what has gone wrong is us. Maybe a few thousand years of progress have actually been a forgetting—forgetting what is important, and then what is essential, then forgetting the forgetting, until we’ve now forgotten there was anything to forget. Maybe this is why, despite all our mastery and perhaps in mockery of it, we the collective Masters of the Universe, find ourselves so completely, totally, lost. Maybe this is why we have no idea who or what we are.

And you know it’s best not to think about such things. But there are moments—aren’t there?—when it cracks. Standing at the seashore, watching the waves come and go. It’s hard to endure there for more than a moment and not have thoughts of eternity. You know the waves were beating upon these shores long before the first living thing crawled out of the muddy waters. You also know they’ll go on caressing, hammering, and pounding shores into oblivion long after we’re gone—until the sun explodes and boils the seas dry.

Have you ever imagined—pure fantasy, of course—that the sea is a wild, ancient, grey-haired goddess, and that all of this has passed under her implacable gaze? And how many times have you looked up at the stars and been lanced through with wonder? We very quickly learn the limits of human language and expression as we feel something in us crack open and ache with futility for the holy light of the stars. And there are other intimations, aren’t there? A flash of a bird’s wing, the voice of a loved one, the scent of a rose after a rainstorm, a musical phrase—all fumbling at some perfection eternally just beyond our grasp and leaving us with not. quite. enough.

But these moments are few and far between. Thankfully. Thankfully, we live most of our lives in safe little boxes. If we didn’t, we’d have to live very different lives and couldn’t wear, not ever, the clothes we prepare for our everyday selves. Our everyday experience is so present, so demanding, so obviously Real, that we find it easy to forget these whispers and we even wonder what crazy people we allowed ourselves to be when we had these passing thoughts.

If we think too long on things like this, something will break. Probably, everything will break. So it’s safest not to.

And so we’re left, overall, with just an inkling that something has gone terribly, completely wrong.

This is why I’m writing. Maybe I’m writing for you. I’m certainly writing for the writing and maybe even for myself. Maybe I’m writing for the rainstorm that just passed. Maybe I’m writing for that line of headless watchers who stand upon the shore—yes, that shore—who have always stood to witness at the place where the water meets the land, and who guard that threshold of unbecoming and being.

What I write here isn’t meant to make you feel good. If anything—if you take it inside like a burning coal—it’s not going to help you feel better. If we do this right, you aren’t going to be okay. You are going to replace many of your certainties with question marks. You’re going to find beginnings where you thought there were endings, no walls where you thought there was safety, and you’re going to see what a joke any map is.

Who wants that? It’s so much easier to move on to the next thing that catches our attention, and to let the ever-present anesthesia make everything better.

I am not writing here to change anything. I think it’s far too late for that. I don’t write here to teach or instruct. What really needs to be known probably can’t be taught and certainly can’t be held in the fragility of language.

Together, we’ll do the best we can.

I’ll show you some things and share some things, but what I’m really doing is making an offering. What I offer here is a gift—maybe even a sacrifice.

I am writing simply because this is required—no more, no less, and nothing else. I am simply writing because it is required.