The IWALLK Essays - 3. Continuously Found

I wanted to let folks know about an interesting aspect of post general anesthetic surgery. I write this now, recalling events from over a week ago.

After I woke up on Friday of last week (10/4), the day after surgery, I began to experience a normal amount of temporary, post-surgical dementia (e.g. short term and verbal memory lapses—like forgetting the name of objects; drifting into thoughts rather than finishing sentences, etc.). Even now this fog is still tapering off, and it's taking a bit longer than I'd anticipated.

Most unexpected was the loss of emotional control. I'd get easily over-frustrated with my inability to remember, but I would also weep openly when being moved by any reminders of the profundity of my new circumstances—that is, getting a second chance at life and what that might truly mean, after the weeks leading up to the surgery. Before surgery I was realistically preparing for the end, accepting that my dreams for later life were to be thrown away in preparation for death. 

Even under normal circumstances it is admittedly difficult for me to discern emotional reactions from emotional over-reactions. (It is sad perhaps that a grown man must use mental issues to equivocate his behavior or admit to actually reacting to deep emotional states while the people around him remain numbed by the habit of insensitivity, but whatever, bub!)

Overall, the situation for me has ranged from being very humorous to being a real drag on my organizational skills. Incidentally, for this reason, I apologize for missing or not replying to the messages, emails, comments at Facebook and the questions you might have been asking. Do please know that the good vibes and healing energy you have expressed have been fully appreciated and have helped me tremendously!

You probably know me by now and have seen how everything that happens can become an opportunity for an impromptu scientific examination? Well, in an attempt to study the post surgical phenomenon while in this unique state, I've discovered that my clarity of thought before speaking (and/or while writing), is much more acute than normal. Nice as this should presumably be, my thoughts aren't effective unless they can be properly expressed. 

It's kind of like the balance between the *origination* of ideas vs their *expression* is significantly eschew. The process is normally more like a seesaw, with the former on one side and the latter on the other, moving up and down to pump out something meaningful. In this case, the former is accumulating data, while the latter is acting like a bottleneck, building up inexpressible thoughts that weigh down the system.

People have asked me online if I wanted help, how I'm doing, when they should stop by, etc. And I can't keep up right now—though I love all the attention! (I was telling someone—can't quite remember whom right now, ha! that I'm going to miss being unhealthy due to all the special attention I've received.)

On the second day after being discharged from the hospital I walked to a new restaurant with my mom. I was in pretty rough shape still, being unable to drive there. Together, Mom and I planned to take buses and walk where we needed to go around town. It was a throwback to a couple years earlier when I set about trying to train her in the South Portland and Portland bus systems before I moved up to my land in Farmington.

As we sat across from each other, each munching on a veggie spring roll and sipping soda, we commiserated on what it was like to forget things so easily and to feel like the world was always looking askance at us; the forgetful—the challenged thinkers.

I have often reminded my mom about things, but now she seemed to be the one in control. This was her world and I was but a transient visitor. Looking into her deep brown eyes, I asked, “Is this what it feels like?”

And, instead of saying, “What?,” she was right beside me on that thought train, nodding. I told her it seemed like a dark place. She suggested, “It is like being far away from everyone, right after the sun goes down; like you're lost in the woods and all you can really see are the tiny lights of civilization flickering on the horizon...” I smiled at her and then she smiled at me.

I said, “Yes, I know what that feels like in real life too. I've been in the middle of nowhere more times than I count! I was fortunate to be able to walk to the horizon each morning though. Not being able to do that is more like being trapped.” The connection of understandable symbolic imagery mixed with my actual physical experience, and knowing what my mom must feel each day, made my eyes well up a bit.

Then she said, “Lately, that's where I am all the time. At least right now we can be lost together.”

On my phone I struggled to find the correct part of the South Portland transit website in order to download PDF's for the Bus 24A, Bus 24B, and Bus 21 schedules. I couldn't focus very well and kept slipping under the mental ice of uncertainty and confusion, thence being pulled along under its surface by my own overriding mental currents. 

If we could arrange to catch a bus out here on the edge of South Portland, we could surely find our way downtown and be able to walk around Mill Creek Park. If I could only move through the fresh autumn air, maybe I could also stay above the mental ice. I was also in a sea of pain and I could not ignore it. Overthinking always makes pain worse, and vice versa.

I was having what felt like a bad trip, like I used to in the old school days. For me, the worst LSD moments of my youth were due to the futile chasing of thoughts over the horizon and the inability to retain short term objectives while being swept along by the ever-arising novelty of newly generated ideas, all produced by the drug experience. In this case, there were no drugs involved. Still, the more I sought to grasp onto the edges of certainty, the more psychic ground broke out from below my feet. And – at least out in public – I was there to watch over my mom! Until I could pull my shit together the safest plan was to simply sit and talk.

Yet time moved on, as it does, and the tangled vines of my indecision eventually showed a hint of loosening up. At some point during my Google searches, I clicked on the correct link and the bus schedule PDFs started to slowly download themselves. When they were ready to view, I discovered that the 24A would be passing right by us to the bus stop located just in front of Amato's in only 20 minutes. We finished our sodas and took what seemed like the enormous risk of leaving our safe place.

But it's a good thing we did! The fresh air instantly revived my pedestrian inclinations and my instincts for negotiating the streets around me popped back in, like a head's up display. What I'd needed all along was simply to walk—a lesson I should have remembered from the bad trip days. If you're stuck in a loop, a mental trap, or an unmovable sense of hesitation, just stand up and walk! It clears the senses, feeds you oxygen, points you in at least some sort of direction! Strange that I should so easily forget my most fundamental rule. 

The walking that saved me from drug hells of high school also (as we know) saved me from the social hell of hypocrisy while my Journeys across America were taking place. 

That's when it turned into “wallking.” Now that I have been given a new life, naturally, its most fundamental tenets should continue to include the option (or the requirement?) of wallking.

We caught the bus and joyfully rolled down Broadway until we reached the South Portland Transit Center. There, we stepped off and found our way to Mill Creek Park. The sun was low, with golden rays fanning out over a dark strip of clouds that were parked on the horizon like a big grey wall. Florescent oranges, reds and yellows gently swayed in leafy waves across the beautiful trees all around the lily pond. I took my mom's hand and we slowly made our way past sleepy ducks, moving along upon the pathway of a new personal freedom. 

Being lost is so much easier if I hold the steady hand of someone who loves me. Come to think of it, as long as we're together, we are never lost at all... We are continuously found... Love is the only destination that is available everywhere.

The IWALLK Essays - 2. Upon the Eve of Uncertainty

I was born three months, three weeks, and three days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on a hot Sunday in July of 1968.

My very earliest memory is of standing in my parents' bedroom while they slept and watching the sun come up over the trees across the driveway. Apparently, I had gotten out of my little bed on my own. I probably had done it a bunch of times before around that age of five, but this time there was something special about this morning—special enough to allow its memory to last right up to this day. I literally heard the melody for “Down by the Station” dance in the air around my parents' room as the Yarmouth train whistle tooted in the distance. The magic mind of a child.

From then on, the noises of my small town became the soundtrack of my childhood. Each night there was the far away but constant moaning cry of the highway. Even in the 1970's that road was turning into a major artery, running through the town, and along with the cargo trains, it supplied us, and the whole DownEast coast of Maine north of us, with everything that kept the state growing into the mature and important New England hub it is today.

These memories from childhood are centermost in my mind as I pass through the contorting hours of an evening that feels like my own personal Gethsemane, here emotionally naked and figuratively lying prostrate on the ground; before the hardest thing I have ever faced takes place. 

Nursery rhymes fill my mind. Then I hear the whispers of past girlfriends; the singing of past bandmates; the joys of parties and festivals; the solemn goodbyes to departed friends; the long lasting heartbreaks along with the fleeting echoes of brief triumphs... 

Here with my eyes closed, they all pass through me like a parade crossing over from another street that came from nowhere and is headed back there. 

In my heart I ride my bike again around the innocent streets of my old neighborhood, buy candy at Frosty's, explore the intricate tidal marshes and sweet-smelling wood trails of the Bayview Street peninsula. My young heart is still there, somewhere inside my old one. 

In the last few weeks I have been learning to separate myself from the world that I've so blithely taken for granted and wallked so far across. I have instead become more aware of the epochs and phenomena involved within the ages that passed by our solar system long before there was an earth or any kind of life crawling out of its protected, warm, shallow-water bays. These ancient images (which have nothing to do with any kind of reincarnation) are brought forth and donated to my consciousness by the generosity (or perhaps charity?) of the Spark at this time—like a gift, from the places and times from whence it once participated. They are far too foggy for me to clearly observe and far too complex for my simple human mind to comprehend, yet. Still, I sit as a witness, awed by Universe events more profound than any that have ever taken place on this planet, as if preparing...for something...just to come. 

The Spark (which is NOT God, nor is it a person, but rather a perfect entity that wants desperately to spiritually fuse with its human host—me, thereby attaining personhood, and by reciprocation, share all of its past eternal experience) tells me that it had already experienced the full lifetimes of several material, human-animal beings on other worlds well-before it's indwelling of my mind. Perhaps it arrived during that first bright morning memory, as I stood by my snoring parents, announced by a train whistle. 

The Sparks – for each of us possesses one – plan out our lives for us long before we are born. They trace our genealogy and well-understand our ancestral lines, as their someday-hosts. They encompass the masterful calculus of all of our possible, but somewhat limited, future, free-will decisions—good and evil. Although they have probably never been on this particular world before, they descend into our minds, holding the vast knowledge about all past eternity. They do not make mistakes. That is up to us.

For the many of us who – through spiritual insight – have been shown these kinds of things about ourselves in one way or another (no matter what terminology we might use to describe it), the temptation is to assume that the Spark looks out at the world through our eyes. 

But a bit of further contemplation eventually reveals that it is the opposite way around. ALL that we see in the world around us is the mixed presentational melody of our personal Spark as we see through it, combined with the Sparks of the people who participate in our life songs, and completed by the collective consciousness of the grand symphony of all other minds (human and otherwise) in our world—from the insects, even up through the countless orders of non-material and spirit beings who share our Cosmos. There is no other outside world. It is ONE thing.

The most surprising thing I have glimpsed of late (something I never suspected until being so close to the potential reality of my own death), is that – in cooperation with the Spark's original plans for me – I have literally co-created this world, with the Spark. Not just my world, but THE world—even all the starry realms above and around the world. For, I am already fused with the Spark somewhere in the future. I am remembering myself as an earthling. Funny huh?

Amazingly, each of us has done this, and is doing this right now for ourselves! Our lives are just as happy, desperate, painful, and hopeful as we personally need them to be, in order to achieve oneness with our Sparks. 

I have found that so many of the things I prayed for as a child have happened in the world (despite the apparently very recent global setbacks that are currently driving us all crazy), besides just having them happen in my personal life. There are SO many, in fact, that I can no longer write them off as a coincidence. Yes, the influence of other minds has made an effect as well, and the over-mind of collective consciousness has laid down the parameters that my single will, alone, cannot override, it will take all of our efforts. Yet, this is MY world and YOURS, created by consciously or unconsciously aligning our Wills with the Spark's plan for human evolution. And now I have verified it (at least for myself) within the future memory of my own Soul.

Somehow, the Spark (with my own superconscious agreement) ordered up a life that was to be so challenging and difficult as to forge a hardened spiritual steel, enduring enough to build an indestructible and eternal self-identity (my Soul). 

I barely made it through to the halfway mark of the standard human lifetime and now have the wonderful gift of anticipating the clearest of points; one where I might actually be liberated from the animal flesh I have used as a life vehicle. In this way, I am confident that I have built a Soul that will be able to survive as a non-material, solid energy manifestation, fully prepared for a new existence and all the adventures that will entail.

Some folks cannot stand the idea that there are ever-higher levels of adventure above this one, and I can honestly relate. They will say that I'm wrong and there is no new beginning. And, that is okay! I am not sure what this limitation means for them—from the perspective of the cosmology I have described above. However, thankfully, it is not for me to say, nor to judge, in the same way that I must avoid the temptation of finding their premature judgement of my belief system to be brutish and primitive. 

We must all make leaps of faith. Everlasting ascension and experiential perfection is one leap. And materialist humanism is another leap. There is no difference in the act of leaping, only in the destination it leads to.

If there is no overlying meaning to our living existence, then it seems to me that there is nothing frightening at all about the sweet, brown, if suffocating, peace of death and thence dying nonexistence. It is simply the allowance for ZERO. Materialism is a real comfort for millions of people in the drowsy, lowering of the light at the end of the life movie—satisfying and perfect, I suppose, in its own way.

When I become New and prove to myself that the future was meant to include me, will you join me there? Could it be here on earth? Could it be as a team in the next existence? I genuinely think it is a simple yes or no decision. Maybe you can see from my experience just how necessary YOU are to OUR New beginning? Maybe not.

I'm done writing the song of life on this very night. And I have finally come to peace with its imperfections. Only the time lag makes me like Schrodinger's cat, a super-positional, quantum waveform in space time—both alive and dead in your future observation of me by late tomorrow afternoon. 

I choose to believe that because I can surmise such a situation at all—knowing full well that time is an illusion, I WILL indeed live, whether you continue to see me here or not.

So, it is with exceeding happiness and confidence that I attempt to heal this broken heart! 

I do very much surrender myself entirely to my destiny whatever it may be, and submit my Soul to the final Will of the Infinite Parents who once cast the Sparks out into the darkness of experiential time and space. 

One of those Sparks now has my eternal promise to merge with it and become a New Being. I will also complete the promise I made to my friends here.

I will wear my Soul on the outside. 

And if it is okay with the Creator to wake up back in the flesh, it will be as a new kind man, one who has been allowed to reenter the world with a final and sanctioned mission.

Then, I believe, something separate but very special, will soon arrive to help us wake up our whole world...

* * * * * * *

LOVE is the Light of the Spark