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You can always feel it coming on. That feeling in the chest; like a spark igniting something flammable, and the heart picks up pace, a kind-of obsessiveness barging in. Everything close by becomes hazy; sound, distant; a feeling of intoxication though not drunk; a body we step into for a while, until its sensations are lived, and its emotions burned-up. And now, others get to experience it as something like this:
Unknown little one known. Now your heart moves mine as galactic breeze moves in our world. I wait. Reach ocean depths there pray in my heart for your safe meeting of ours, face to face.1
The spark giving life to this poem came from a heartbeat. The wild, determined thumping of an embryo that took up residence in my wife’s body eight weeks prior. After 17 years of marriage and 48 years on planet earth, admittedly, this was an unexpected event that put all plans on ultra-slow burn, all the way until I’m typing this now, some three years later. But I don’t say this with a heavy heart. Rather, with gratitude.
You see… one day, I woke up.
Or I thought I had.
Because it took four more years to see that I had simply woken up in another padded cell of the insane asylum; another fifteen years to see the light of day, and another two years to cross the threshold into clarity, certainty, and a new life.
A 21-year transformation from ape-person-thing to human-thing (according to present calculations), and in the process I discovered the greatest deception in history. A generational conditioning of humainty that begins with what we believe about ourselves, and it goes back thousands of years. A norm that says no such thing exists, as simultaneously, multitudes believe they’ve already broken free—while regurgitating popular slogans, following pop-culture “spirituality,” and choosing political sides.
At the time of writing this piece, I’ve been gathering, researching, making notes, writing (and deleting) for some 26 years. Not for writing’s sake—I’m more of a poetry guy—but writing became more of an obsession, and over time, as I found what I was looking for, it converted into something more creative.
From the beginning, I knew I wanted to present my work as a shared experience. But my lack of experience with what I was writing about as well as my lack of experience in writing made the method seem pretentious. So I never went through with it. And along the way I released several mediocre versions of things into cyberspace as I learned how to write, as I travelled, as my writing changed, as I changed, as I learned and progressed along this journey.
But it’s strange, and also interesting, how things work their way around to the beginning. A necessary cycle, it turns out, so we can understand why—why it can’t be any other way. And with that little heartbeat of another creation still being prepared for its emergence into this world, as far as my writing was concerned, in my mind’s eye I saw a little figure standing atop a sun-soaked hill, waiving a broad white flag, as though saying, “This way, dad!” And things did a full circle as I returned to the original idea from more than two decades prior, which until that moment, I couldn’t implement. Not because it was pretentious, after all, but because something was amiss all along.
I knew that a great responsibility lay ahead because soon, I’d be shaping a tiny part of the future that will continue after I’m gone. And I could either watch, as my daughter gets absorbed into a way of life, a norm, that acts like a vampire bat on cattle as it sucks the blood from the poor creature while leaving it in a state of sleepiness, or I could help her understand why she must seek her independence from it, and what, exactly, that means.
Each of us has a unique story (a unique creative principle) that was stolen from us at a young age, and replaced with a fabrication thereof. And those who undertake the journey to rediscover it inevitably cross similar hurdles others have for thousands of years, but in our unique ways, formed by our unique circumstances. What some find easy, others will never surmount; what others do not see, some play in its pastures and fields. And everyone can learn something from everyone else; and very often, students become teachers.
I can never ask her to follow me because that would be my story, not hers. But I can share the mistakes and successes of someone who assumed he cared until learning genuine concern; of someone who considered he loved until learning what that means; from one who believed he was free until discovering he was just another self who had trapped himself in yet another manufactured point of view… until pushing beyond those boundaries, too.
That self denied by only the most unfortunate, yet referred to by several things throughout the millenniums: a light, an essence, life, energy, spirit, air/wind, monad/word, the true self, ruh, tao, the awakened self… the soul. But the faculty between this self and the personality, the threshold between the material world and the grand awakening to true reality, is the mind, which can be likened to a little bird.
Because, like a little bird, it twitters and flaps about while jumping from branch to branch. In that it’s something needing to be, not confined, but brought under conscious control, made to sit still, so it stops flapping about, stops getting distracted with flashy-flashy, and noise. Now still, it opens to another world, like a flower to sunlight, and a new life begins, as though a child again.
The inner child.2
And when connecting to this inner child, we become, step by step, a better version of ourselves. A version we think we don’t need to be until realizing we have to, that we simply must bring ourselves closer to, and then into, the light from which we were taken. A metaphorical rebirth into the same world but with a new awareness of the world that’s balanced between fascination for this new perspective on things, coupled with a disturbing uneasiness for the way things have become, and where they’re heading (personal growth); the urge to encourage others to break free from its many illusions (collective growth); and a burning desire to reach for higher ground, even if we must do it alone (spiritual growth). Hence, the soul is also referred to as a child because only the child always asks—why?
As the great 13th century Persian poet, Jalal ad-Din Rumi, said:
Humble living does not diminish. It fills. Going back to a simpler self gives wisdom. When a man makes up a story for his child, he becomes a father and a child together, listening.3
But I’d like to add to that. Because what if someone listens in on this transient conversation… ?
So, I would like to ask—if I may—that you get comfortable, detach from the daily grind for a moment, away from the distractions, away from the noise, and look within. Then, imagine, if you will, you’re partaking in communications from one child to another, where age plays little part, as you listen in on conversations between father and child, after asking—why?
1 Eye of Light, 2024.
2 Symbolically, a child also represents an ignorant person convinced they’re knowledgeable, even wise, and refuses to look any further. But in terms of the soul, it represents innocence, purity, etc. Like a lamb.
3 An excerpt from: The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks.
