Everything is crystal clear.
Yes, I have clarity,
and I am no longer afraid.
The clarity I have is unreal, but it is The Truth. The clarity feels like when the world melts away in a dream,
and you are suddenly in a different world entirely,
still carrying on the same conversation,
but when you wake up you cannot quite recall if you were speaking at all,
or humming, or thinking inside your head,
your head which was now a communal place that anyone could look into and hear your most embarrassing thoughts.
I woke up longing for the dream. The communal mind.
In that moment,
it came to be in an intrusive epiphany that felt like a violent seizure.
I was foaming at the mouth,
and spoke to The Truth in the blackness
that is not quite blackness behind my eyelids.
I knew at once what I must do, and I was afraid,
and I felt the glory of life itself, the glory of humanity, the glory of the dead men in dead wood beneath my feet,
and then I was no longer afraid.
The Truth said,
what will be needed is this:
1a) People, all.
1b) We would not come at once. We would each awaken in our own ways, in the splendor of light or at the baseness of our worst sorrows.
1c) We would come in waves, crashing into the new existence. We would become the tide of humankind, retracting from the binding shore, receding within ourselves.
1d) Yes, we would mostly come alone, or in ones and twos, but we would all come, eventually.
2a) Earth.
2b) Raw earth, the earth out of which our arrogant grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and great-great-grandfathers rejected the unity of the prehuman condition and carved out their independent destinies.
2c) Yet to the earth they always returned — in reconciliation, or clawing their way from the dirt until their bodies moved no more. The earth in its infinite peace forgave them. It housed their fetid frames that rotted down into individual molecules.
2d) We have all fed the earth, but no longer will it need to wait like a scavenging dog. We will go willingly into the earth and as it has before,
2e) it will give us the next iteration of life.
3a) Time.
3b) Time will be the great equalizer. The first layer of us will perish eons before the final layer is completed. But we will be steadfast.
3c) We will be patient.
3d) We will be the parents to the child.
3e) We will all join into the stew of life.
3f) We will all forfeit individuality, egotism, self-conceit.
3g) It is not a matter of choice, it is a matter of
3h) when.
So in great epiphany, I left the place that I had called home for 37 years.
I went out in the clothes I had worn to sleep the night before.
I wished to go with no fear, with no tethers to the material world, but I was still bound to human shame. No matter, no matter at all — the path to freedom had unfurled before me.
I walked through the farm that my parents had once owned, and then left to me.
It reeked of cow shit and had yielded tons of mushrooms in its festering life.
All those who passed by would see it as a sign post along the path.
All those who passed by would tip their hat, bow, kiss its feet.
I reached the edge of their property,
and then walked through to my neighbors’ farm,
and then the farm next to theirs.
I walked on dirt paths and through fallen corn stalks.
I walked until I reached a line of trees, in a place that had never been cleared for farms.
Yes, I walked through the generations of bastard-earth,
of the god-man sodomizing the fertile ground. Until I reached where man’s hands had been broken — by rocks, and clay, and threats.
I walked over acorns and pine needles.
They lay on top of one another, begging the earth to accept them. Begging to be given their next form of life.
This was the prayer I too would make.
After hours of walking,
my feet blistered,
my skin grew red from the sun.
And I came to where human life would end.
There, deep in the woods, was a pit.
.
.
.
.
.
It seemed impossibly wide. It opened across the horizon of the tree line. It opened beyond human perception. It would open into my new perception.
I came to the edge of the pit,
and looked down into it.
.
.
.
.
.
Mr. Ramirez was already lying in the center, face up. Dark skin made darker by the noon heat. He said nothing to me as I looked down at him.
We no longer needed to speak to understand each other.
I walked to the side of the pit,
then kept walking,
then began to fall.
I hit the bottom of the pit a moment later, but there was no pain.
My body curled naturally into the side of Mr. Ramirez’s stout frame.
We fit perfectly together, as we all would.
We would be the foundation.
The sun is setting. More have already joined us.
Sandra, a woman who was once girl I knew,
who I will now know as myself.
A man from another town,
whose face went from agonized to blissful as he stared down at us.
We all curl and twist to take on the new forms of each other. We all begin to congeal.
I — WE — no doubt will lose our mortal bodies in the coming days.
No matter, no matter at all — we will be reanimated by the next layer,
and them, by the next.
We will live once again as more life joins us.
We will all be reborn as each other.
The pit will open for you too!
The pit will open for you too!
Wash yourself clean
of sadness,
of pettiness,
of hatred,
of ill-will,
of the individual sufferings that manifest in the hateful notion of body and mind and soul.
Cast off your rags, brother,
the hair,
the skin,
the evilness born in flesh.
You are absolved from the body of man!
We are here.
We have done the hard work,
the miracle has already begun.
We simply await you.
CASSE-COUILLES 