There’s a tender ache that winds its way through the seeker’s path. It is inevitable and yet inexplicable. It awakens, and asunders.
It’s the paradox, mainly, that excites and entices the Soul, drawing it through it’s celestial path. Here be connection. But first, you must disconnect. So wild and uncomfortable the concept, our human selves recoil.
The human, does not see the comedy within paradox. It is a gnarled and viscous limb of the awesome God we read about in books. It is tainted and discredited by our mind, primed for reason. We call such things ‘evidence’ and ‘proof’ when they sit in contradiction. We’re not taught to hold duality. We’re not taught that one coin has many sides.
The infinite and unfathomable spaces that live betwixt, the nether crevices of consciousness, can at times appear to the most intrepid as an obvious sign to return.
‘Go back’, your human self will quickly whisper, awaiting objection, and when there is none it’s words will turn to a roar.
So you may return to the offices and cubicles, to the deafening hum hum hum of a fluorescent light overhead and it’s cellular demand for homogeneity. You think to yourself, ‘This isn’t my memory. This isn’t my life’. You blame the broken seeker’s journey and its terrible guidance. You blame the light that shone upon your path only to dissolve into the shadows and cracks on the beaten pathway.
It’s The Trickster, that you’ve met. The archetype of the holy and the most unholy. Ripe for your projections and fears to be reflected so brightly that the path you had thought to be wholesome and sanctimonious becomes animated with the demons of your past.
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It’s the strangest thing, awakening. Our consciousness sparking and spluttering it’s way to life. Its virgin breath exhilarating, and so divinely familiar. Like home, but warmer. Like a womb, but exponentially brighter.
Your eyes glisten with reverence. Your heart fills with possibility- huge, unbridled possibility- unlike that of youth or first love or the tender shoots of spring.
You hear melodies in the mechanical drone of jamming traffic.
Every cell and every neuron, every synapse singing with elated, exalted connection. Within, and without. Every ‘thing’ swimming as a drop in the same, infinite and bless’d ocean.
‘This, is connection’, you think to yourself. ‘This, is the pinnacle of all creation.’
And there within your merry hubris, slips and slides your fledgling steps, as you find the floor beneath to not be made of earth or stone, nor clay nor carpet nor grass.
You stand suspended instead above a wild, gaping chasm. There is no floor. There is no ceiling.
Where did you go? You ask the memory of primal connection.
As you find your friendships dissolve. Your life without lustre. Your days turn to dark.
You shake your world, begging the light’s return, or at least for sleep to hold you once again.
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The Trickster revels in this absurdity. He watches you squirm as your eyes turn from wild excitement to terror and rage. You’d followed the light, you tell him, and now the world has blackened and stuck like tar upon you. When you turn back, it stays the same. There is no world. There is no heaven.
You sling your hate at him. Your hurt and deceit. You call him names and wonder why you wanted more. It wasn’t so bad, you think. It wasn’t all but it wasn’t nothing.
You slam him with the injustices. The logical and axiomatic reasoning that you’d so fondly attached yourself to, in another life, when you were still ‘you’.
I followed the light, you cry.
I followed the good.
I followed connection and now I am alone and grieving and my body is falling apart, limbs ripped from my body.
This isn’t right. This isn’t just.
You sit, broken in despair. Your heart calling itself to beat with the lapsing impulse no longer served by your brain.
You wish to yourself that you’d never, ever dreamed.
That connection beyond that shared over a coffee was a delusion and that all connection on earth was merely a transaction of needless, worthless habit.
You find yourself asking ‘who am I?’
When all that I know about myself to be true, is no longer true.
When all that I’d allowed myself to be illuminated by, the opinions of others and their belief in me and the smiling reflections I’d see as I’d walk by another. When all that disappears and I’m floating in nowhere with no one, but myself. But my Soul.
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The Trickster now begins to curl his mouth at the sides, arching upward toward the twinkle of mischief ripe in his eye.
“This” he says in a tongue that I’ve never heard yet I understand entirely “is the dawn”. He points a long and twisted finger to the distance where a star bursts its way into existence. You shield your eyes because for the briefest of moments your human tells you there’s danger in looking upon stars that burst.
The Trickster pulls at your arm, antagonising your brain to change its waves. To change the beliefs that hold you in darkness.
As you peel your eyelids back, you’re struck with the profound and pristine truth. That sometimes your brain or the brains of others or the books or the schools have no idea of your capacity to hold the light.
As light fills the sky, you see at first just the side of The Tricksters face, soft and luminous. No longer gnarled and despicable as it once was.
You see his long and twisted finger is not in fact a finger, but a wand that is grasped between pulpy fingertips.
He is no longer The Trickster.
He is The Magician.
As he excised the abstractions and attachments from your life, and you could only see loss and hurt.
As he took from you friends and family and you mourned so deeply your insides became necrotic and impotent.
As he stripped you of everything that gave you pride, or joy, or a reason to rise from bed in the morning and proclaim to the world ‘here I am’.
He gave you ‘you’.
‘This is your Soul’ he tells you in a besotted reverence you’d never before been touched by.
You feel connection beyond the superfluous. Beyond the conditioning of your past and that of your parents and ancestors.
You feel the violent art of the star colliding with your cells and energy coursing your veins. You feel its warmth and inevitability and eternal glory.
You see, beyond seeing, the rhythm and tone of a connected and abundant universe.
You see You.
