The Spaces Between

Something slips away, something ineffable and yet pivotal.

I grasp at it with words and thoughts, search for it in pain and solitude and introspection. Lost in the details of the experience, the experience itself is obscured, a forest lost in its own trees.

Too long away from the mass of humanity and I freeze in the arctic winter of the soul, burn in the solitary eye of the merciless sun. Too close, and I drown in a sea of innuendo, stifled by conformity and the fear of individual accountability... and still there is no clear vision, nothing concrete to club into submission and hold aloft before the tribe and shout "There! There is MEANING!"

Amid the dross of day-to-day, I mine (and waste, 'tis sad but true) the precious perspective and comprehension that give form and meaning to my life, whether lost in jungles of steel and concrete, scaling stone with time at a standstill, or walking the sunlit paths of the undiscovered country.

Life is enormous, onrushing, merciless, wondrous, and cruelly magical. It grinds the timid down, and shatters the fragile; offering illusions and grandeur, demanding no less than everything, exalting saints and sinners alike in its tidal coursing. My only answer, within myself, is to resolve to hew as close to the heartwood as I can or may, in the few days I am given between waking and the final sleep.

The wolf howls not only to the lonesome moon, but to those others who listen, and to the thousand who cannot or will not hear. I sit before this sterile screen, fingers dancing on the clicking Ouija before me, trying to give meaning to the past, hoping to find hope in the future; spinning bridges between the island souls I cannot see and may never know; sharing the Quest, breaking this bread of common communion, spilling out the wine of my blood and soul.

The forests and summits, lost rivers and cool green valleys, sweeping tundra and starlit deserts, these are all only mirrors, no more nor less so than the blank page, the kata, or the hymn. What we see there, in those mirrors, is only a reflection of a waking mind, of the barest cloud shadow that drifts on the surface of deep waters; a glimmer of what was, what is, and what may be.

The goal is to fish deep, trawling for lost dreams and forgotten summits, unafraid to comb the beaches of the mind for even the smallest fragment. Thus do we fill our days and nights with treasures, returning again and again to the knowledge that no net is completely empty, when each cast brings back traces of that inner sea.