The Yielding

In 2008, deemed psychotic, I dropped everything I knew about everything I claimed to know.

I discovered a new world. 

Ah no, I cannot tell you what it is, the new world.

I cannot tell you the mad, astounded rapture of its discovery.

I shall be mad with delight before I have done,

And whosoever comes after will find me in the new world a madman in rapture.”

-D.H. Lawrence, A New Heaven and Earth

The Yielding

I live a post-apocalyptic life.

The end found me alone.

Alone and wanting, I stunk of self. Everywhere I turned, self was there. Wherever I went, there it was.

Self—that paralytic nerve, pinching the will. Say Uncle.

Mornings were not new in the old world. The only thing that changed was time. Time over time, the caccooning lattice, sarcophagal walls. Deeper in self each morning, drawing shade over shade, wrapping layers, warping sight, the thousand mirrors refracting self.

I was everywhere. It was not me.

No one else saw how it ended. Only me. No one else was with me when the earth swallowed me whole. I had to make that journey alone. I had to descend to the pit of it, through molten layers, the viscous core. Not that I chose to, I lost the choice not to.

It’s wild surviving the end like that. When the day in doesn’t differ from the day out. To watch the night, but not the watchman. To say daybreak can’t break you because the night already broke all over it. To gather those pieces like shrapnel and reassemble the bomb. Tick. Tick. Waiting for the one.

The one strand to string them all together.

One fuse to light—one eye to watch it burn.

It burned all right.

It all burned, right?

And I didn’t stop to ask, did you feel that?

I just stayed shook and hung on to whoever I could. They didn’t know I clung to them like clothes. They didn’t know the distance I travelled to keep them close.

On the day, a decade ago, I had to let them go.

For in the end, I tell you, you are alone. Not seperated, for in separation we still have others at a distance. We all must separate from. Isolated atoms in a bomb. There is no coinciding without bringing the end on. Some things never end. What will end rushes to its destination.

Each morning felt the final dawn.

This must be it, I never said.

Then the flash.

Did you see it?

Of course you didn’t.

It was my world. The flame of a distant fire, extinguished.

Who took my hand when I reached out from the debris?

It was you.

You were there to pull me through the ruins. We walked a long distance. We ate when we were hungry. We drank coffee. We talked of the war without taunting the enemy. We neutralized the problem, cauterized the wounds. Scars became tattoos.

And what did I learn?

The self is of unchanging size. Only the thought of self can grow or diminish. Believing anything else is the worst kind of foolishness. It is the foolishness that can’t call itself a fool—like how the devil must call himself a god. The self doesn’t grow. Only illusion.

What can grow is the yielding. Reality is the expanse I wanted when I chased and dug and crawled through the delusions of my spacious end. There is an unquestionable truth, beating like a proverbial heart, with selves serving as endless veins to pump and spread what has already been distributed, to conquer what has already been conquered. How foolish I was to think I could create what has already been created, to invent what has already been made.

To understand the self as small and unchanging is one thing; to realize the small and unchanging self as part and parcel to the great unknown girth of the ages is another. True power—the real stuff, the stuff not subject to the illusion of ownership—is connecting to the otherness.

I almost died because I did not know the otherness. Not knowing the otherness almost killed me.

It could have been nothingness for all I knew. When I let go, I let go of it all. My conquered space, the kingdom of self. I did not know into what I would fall. I only knew I had to fall. Nothingness would have been welcomed change.

Anything, even nothing, was better than all of it at once.

So I fell. I quit holding on to the hands that held me under. I fell backwards, but it was a dive. A straight plunge into the deepest self. A plunge shattered by shallowness.

And what did I find?

I found otherness.

I found you.

And then, in a masterful twist of truth, I discovered that self is nothing without otherness. Self is you. Knowing you better was to better know myself. There was no knowing self without you first.

Growth became a yielding, not an acquiring. Growing is a letting go of, not a holding on to.

I learned that commonwealth is far richer. I learned that reality is love. That pain is love. That choice comes from love and good choices lead back to the start. I found love to be more spacious of an expanse than the universe we claim to be ever expanding.

What’s shared is an exponential joy, disconnected from the linearity of isolation and the singularity of dread.

Oh holy multiplicative!

Yielding yields more.

In my post-apocalyptic life, it becomes harder to recognize the old self, the self who believed in straight lines and status and numerology and logistics and analytics as aspects of truth. It becomes harder and harder to talk of aspects at all. Truth has none. Love has no aspect either. Others—I love you, others, you gateways to otherness—say remember when and I say yes. But all that I could ever remember is not equal to the force of all that I have forgotten.

Existence is a singular phenomenon, a shared initiation—it is preliminary worth.

Nothing worthwhile comes without it.

I may not always remember the myriad of aspects that lead to it, but I pray to never forget the endless joy that comes from it.

Beauty is bare existence. Ugliness is everything else.