“Empty your mind; be formless, shapeless – like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle, you put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
Small fish in a big pond again. Waters unfamiliar. Temperatures unfavorable. I splashed through the tough tides to a new stillness, but not without consequences. Every turn seems to have dangerous destinations these days.
All previous identities have been stripped by the swim to the new world. The past is relatively irrelevant now, all awards and accomplishments and accoutrements are great stories in other schools and pools, but mostly useless when you're starting over altogether.
I am legend in my own mind, a legacy before its time.
Arrogance and ego led me to leave the confines of a safe, comfortable and familiar shore for a spark in the deep. A hunt for the sunken embers of passions lost. A curious dive into the abyss called
Me.
I've reached the peaks of what's possible, and from that height I dove without a secure chute. Wingless. Cableless. Clueless.
But confident. Cautious and careful not to take this turn for granted. I sit drawing a religious institution in two-point perspective during the middle of the weekday under aqua skies, in the chambers of Art, as opposed to the confines of a Power Point.
This is a place and person that I've never been before, and I remind myself to breathe and be patient.
With respect to success, they say you should visualize your destination. Sometimes, it's not sight that ensures your survival, but bliss and blindness. No seer can see everything, even if our myths and superheroes have omniscient characters. Nobody knows (see Leonard Cohen). Not really. Not Horoscope, fortune cookie, nor prophet.
Certainly not Paula White.
We all play the odds of the lies, tied to rise and fall of our life source. Today, my inner sun is dim as I plunge further below the known depths. I hold my breath, and woe the ripples that I've caused by my descent.
Previous projects now off course, communicated targets no longer in sight, comfort off kilter. A life in the throes of a different kind of chaos, a submersion in self so complete that oxygen is scarce.
The light is different at the base of yourself. Obscurious. Xenoviolet. Prismed by the echoes of older times and trials, alien rays refracting back through the jagged plane above.
A return to the surface would signal acquiescence to the reality that I left. The endless, concentric waves of change repeating from the epicenter of my choice ensure an unfamiliar return to surface. The dry world above is different now, dissimilar to this spelunker.
Every fish is faced with need to sink or swim regularly, regardless of size, 401k, market stability or temperature of the water during their daze of drowning. In the depths of the abyss, the spark calls to me. This descent is different than the rest, its flow is growing on me.
Time to learn to swim, again. There's no sink left in these gills.
#metalmorphosis #xoterica
