Idle frenzy

To begin, let the bones in your fingers disappear. Feel the flesh of your palms take on a new weight.

When I sit down to write, I cannot write. Yet when I am out and I see things and smell and hear them, the images bloom inside my skull, with words attached. Sometimes just one word, like when I saw all the machinery sitting silent as the buses rolled slowly past the construction zone. “Idle,” my mind gave to me. Or when the clutches of rugby fans, their colourful scarves and huge hats dancing with their steps, crowded me to the edge of the pavement, “frenzy” skidded past. Idle…frenzy. Perhaps that is the magnet kiss of my life.

But the words also fail me. Even now my mind cannot grasp the string of letters that signify the power that keeps us stuck to the earth instead of floating into the sky. Instead of the correct word, my mind insists we are all held to the ground by gratitude.

I am learning to let go of the fear of retribution. Slowly I am becoming free. I do not believe in God. I do not believe in the man in the sky who will judge me and hold me up or cast me down. Even as a child I felt this, although I had no way to express it. Finally abandoning the idea of a sky god is…a relief. What remains is what I have always felt - the endless vibration of the tiniest of tiny things. A multitude of minute frictions, the ultimate trance dance and the coveted space between, in which calm spreads out like a plain, the sunset scrubbing the arc of the entire horizon.

Katsu! Is like a hand across a window, creating a bow of clarity, through which one can see a vista of nothing. What a view! cries the monk in his last breath.

I remember the word now. It is gravity.