On Shark-Fins

I have this feeling like I am on the cusp of some greater understanding, and that I need an extended period of rumination to bring it forth.

I have collected the story of Christ as it is, before the creation of the Church. I have heard certain colorful descriptions of the paths to enlightenment which use the stories in the new testament to make their case. I understand, in part, the significance of Jesus and the structure of the spiritual connection to God described (in some, by some) as being a part of our place in the world.

I understand, in part, the universal nature of the human experience to the situations and abstractions present in the tarot, the zodiac, the kabbalah. A world there, many worlds, remain to be seen.

But then above, a mantra of release and mindlessness – in the teachings of Zen, in certain western sorts of Buddhism, which decry the story, the method, the synthesis, the study, the digging, the seeking, the hunt.

A final system would be a synthesis – it is the continual practice of presence during each step of the hunt. It is the immediate acceptance of the failure therein, and the knowledge of all endeavours as worthless.

But how, then, do I justify hunting at all? Am I still furious to venture and return empty-handed? That is all I can do. I am resigned to a life of fishing into sterile waters. Both out of necessity, in case I never find anything there, but also as the extension of the logic of the nature of reality (for I so deeply know all, and see all!) in that there is no truth there. At least, there is no truth which I or any mortal thing (and participant in the universe itself) can possibly grasp. Even the presence of such a truth would elude me, as a shadow which has never left me, and never will.

So it is. I will feel the steps, and the sand beneath my feet. I will smell the pines, I will taste the water. Better yet- the future is gone from me. These things, I do only now.

I smell now, I taste now. I feel the keys under the pads of my coarse fingertips, I pull at the plastic with the gentle adhesion of sweat at the pads of my thumbs. My eyes behold a miraculous bio-electric system wherein The Meaning is born to this less-than-fertile place.

So, I see. And Now, from Here, would begin the journey into the depths and the Nature of Things. Ever lost to me is the end, the truth to strangle and press between my fingers until it is soaked in through the wrinkled palms and sates this anxious heart with gold-and-lavender warmth. My heart is cooled in every moment by the rush of a perpetual, icey stream which had once been the future, and it warms itself in a kind of shivering- a buzzing- fueled by the energy of a hungry animal with idle hands, open eyes, a dry and empty mouth.

A different image, and I suspect a misunderstanding on my part, rests in my mind when I ponder the nature of myself and us: that I, in my entirety, am the fin, but the shark beneath is not itself alone. The air, the sky, the clouds, the stars, the endless black behind- I have no means to touch or feel or see them. Less so do I see, for the glare, what lies beneath. And here are fins around me, and we circle each-other, borne along by some cosmic action (maybe intelligence?) below. Then the counter-shaded bellies turn lazily toward the sun, and we are gone.

For I am not the fin, but the fin-in-the-air. Yet the sky, the stars, and the sea are not for me.