I was doing some random gmail search a few moments ago, and came upon this piece of writing I sent us all early last year. I read it, and I liked some parts a lot, surprisingly.
Let me know what you think...
Time has passed since our lives' paths diverged. Since that moment we've been making our own trails.
To those we know, we're lost. To our own perception, off somewhere in the wilderness of the place we think we know: our modern world.
It's like we all began to run when we last saw each other. A full speed race forward, through the same forest, in a similar direction.
We lose our breathes and slow down to a stop.
We turn around to see the ground we just covered, and do our best to hold still. And there, dizzy from running we imagine, look for, even listen for the people who are closest to what we consider our soul.
We wonder how far away the others have gone, and how close they may be.
As our senses adapt back to stillness, our breathing persists, our dilated pupils take in more light , our sweat sensitizes our skin.a
We hear silence amidst the movement of the trees' leaves and a distant singing bird.
This gaze in silence allows us to know the place we've stopped to the best of our ability. And at that moment our imagination asks questions about the others.
Where are you all? How far away have you ventured from me? How close is where you are to where I am? How fast are you running and can you stop?
Then you move on to imagine them having a similar moment somewhere nearby, but out of sight. Out of sight but still on the tree-covered rolling hills into which we were released the day we said goodbye to Guate.
You feel like yelling to break their silence.
You imagine how fast their hearts are beating, how they've made out from the run, what's on their minds and what's going on in their brains.
I imagine you each bursting through the door of your family house, your dorm or residence, and turning onto the road that connects you with what you occupy your hours with.
All around you, the real, the real, the real. Your world pumps with to do's, worries, introspections, anticipations, deadlines, self-images, images of others, things you look forward to. Your world is permeated by snippets of your best friends in your mind, in people you meet. Your world is attacked by pictures of the outside world of politics, economic catastrophes, mind-numbing shards of a broken civilization we euphemize as "social problems."
These things all float in and out of your awareness, engulfing you with what collectively fills your conscious mind in your everyday life.
Real, real, real, you mold your image of the real, the everyday the outside world with everything you arbitrarily label as real. A way of acting, a way of working, a way of being social, a way of buying groceries, a way of making money, a way of planning your next steps. For me, the irony is that the more real all of this feels, the more unsure you feel about its nature, the more unsure you are of its concrete existence. The more you question its validity, its natural qualities, its humanness.
Oh my, we begin to find how incredibly odd real things are. How incredibly arbitrary, how incredibly contingent the way things happen to be in our lives and in the world.
In light of this, we see how potentially boundless our lives are, but while rejoicing in this feeling of freedom we're reminded of how easy it is to fall into complacency.
It's startling how etched in stone our past and future lives' general trajectory can feel at times.
This street we walk down that makes up this real world is there. Cement, stop signs, some trees, people walking buy, the local businesses. It's there and it doesn't change. The laws that govern how it works are understood in our heads. Their details are formed in our heads. We create this real world in which the tall buildings seem to topple over us from both sides, and the demands of the everyday seem to surround us as if in the air. We ourselves beg reality to suffocate us.
We snap back into our minds from this muse… As we walk down the streets our conscious mind becomes too conscious of the presence of its unconscious, and we lose weight, and float up, high. Higher, higher above your street and towards the south. Your town or city gets further away. You feel the coolness of a cloud envelope you as you lose sight of the surface of the earth. You smell no trace of the refuse of our modern mode of production up here. You are in solitude, free from "reality." Your inner body bursts with a sunshine as you're relived of that weight and its intricate detailed distortion of your human-ness.
You blast out of the clouds, you look back. The sun. As you move through empty atmosphere, the sun beats upon you. So far from the shelter of your tall buildings, your homes, the bodies of your lovers, the still trees, your blankets, your grocery store.
So far from all that has made you what you are; all that's sealed within the emotion you know as comfort.
Before your rational mind has time to catch up with your wandering will, you fall.
Screaming from the inside out you lose the height you gained in a freefall. You fall, you fall, you fall.
A plane of primal blue approaches you in space, you approach it. You plunge into the waters of Lake Atitlan.
The waters that presenced your childhood match the wavelengths of the liquid in your system. The water takes you in and pads your landing. You float up to the surface slowly, observing the hundreds of bubbles. Your lack of air leads to anxiety. You reach the surface, breathe in, and look around. While you lie on your back, you feel you're as close to a home you'll ever be, as close to freedom as ever, the home base where you once said goodbye to with everything to lose, and the world to gain.
You're far from your puzzling "reality." You ask yourself, "how to speak of my "real" life and "real" world while aware of its dumbfounding contradictions, irrationality, its unsustainability, its insubstantiality. An array of "uns" and "ins" can be useful when you try to wrap your mind around your "reality."
Words that dissolve into the purity of the vivid blue sky. You lie on your back; a floating masterpiece of flesh, bones, organs, hair, skin and clothing. Your peripheral acknowledges four inverted volcanoes and a circle of mountains. Your ears hear silence, the hum of your own body, in sync with the tides of the lake. You begin to backstroke towards the shore.
You close your eyes, spin your chest towards the earth, and paddle your feet until you feel one dig into the muddy sand. You shift your weight, into it and your body emerges, wading through the water. You're back in your waters, back , striding thorough the waters of your culture, your home base, your childhood, your makeup.
On your next step, you feel your home's familiar floor beneath your feet. Your right foot is next, soon your body is clothed, your backpack is on, you look up, down the street, directly into the big building you once knew you had to walk to.
You close your eyes, regain presence, feel a smile creep across your face, and pick up your pace, that stride by stride develops into a sprint… The most intentional sprint you've every run.
