TEMPLE HQ

THIS DREAM AGAIN, DEJA VU!

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11-24-2021

Snow howls. The sky is dark. Mute light crunches into the bed of crystalline sand every time you step, footprints vanishing within hours, the wind threatening to scrub you off, sanding and abrading the landscape smooth and empty. We are somewhere hostile to life, neither of the ground nor sky, an aberration against the both absence and presence.

I was inside the metal cubes of piped-in warmth and electric comfort when the land was driven up. The snow beneath your feet goes on forever, compacted deeper and deeper. The sky goes up and up, atmosphere escaping, forever. Between infinities of depth, sideways is the only realm we have to ourselves.

Particles reform when motion animates the thin boundary between two absolutes. Our human realm between is a world of struggle begetting winds, dunes, crevasses, us pathetic wretches who cling to life in a world that despises even death, despises anything short of a bluntly simple duality. The wind howls hate, the dunes form in anger, as the sky rebels against the earth and the earth rebels against the sky. We inhabit the no man’s land, the scars of their interlocked bodies, as the violence of their conflict forms the world and our comfort.

Ducking, skittish, running like terrorized field mice. Violent clashes come and go, when the whole world is mixed up. Open the door when the worst of its over and its settled back to the usual volleys relayed through swirls of wind across the hills. See the roads disappear, see a particle that used to be here now thousands of miles away and on and on, see the whole of everything remade in a great violence.

In the right light, with the right mind, you can look over the tundra at blizzard and see unity. The two wrestlers so locked together, you can’t tell where one body ends and the other begins. When it all settles back into division, something more than combat occurred. The identical bodies seem to have morphed, changed their form, borrowing and giving, reformed when they remade themselves in separation.

And in the midst of it all, with the small red light of a little device, with the burning desperate heart, I said wrapped in blankets, the darkness and violence beyond, I said against a tundra so total I felt as though I were underwater - “let there be light”.