The Enormity of Now

Nothing,

There’s nothing

Not a single word

Or even a phrase

That can express –

You see, it was just so –

And then, when I close my eyes and breathe in deeply, it’s like –

But then, it’s gone on the exhale.

Because there’s no word

No word to describe Everything.

And I ask myself,

Was it the dry, warm desert air, the smell of salt and my hair which was drying, floating lazily in the breeze?

Or was it the enormity of it?

The enormity of the moment that stretched around this drop in the endless bottomlessness.

My eyes were not crafted to see in ultraviolet

The landscape laughs at me

In my fragility

And in the blindness of this being human.

What does the word ‘sunset’ even describe?

Six letters typed into a searchbar brings a flood of images taken by other humans,

Painted ones

Hazy ones

Blurry ones

Retouched

Photoshopped

Disturbingly colorful

Unsettlingly beautiful

Oh, and  how they taunt me

“look at this thing that you missed, this point of extraordinarity, sliver in time, suspended now in 2D forever.”

“wishing you were here”

And that’s the line that pops out at me,

This “wish you were here”

Because when the world we take for granted stops and shouts at us in technicolor,

And we stop in our tracks

Mouths making ‘o’s,

Pupils dilating

Hearts swelling,

Don’t we think of someone we know we could share this with? WE think, “OH MY GOD! My mother would die if she could see this!”

Or, achingly, “My fiance should have been here with me.”

I could name all the colors as they shift and change and morph and swirl

I could snap a picture, and try to show you

But what you miss is the enormity

The enormity of a moment wrapped around you in 360 degrees

That slides past you and through you

The enormity of “pinkish orange reddish WOW”

Like, that – that right there – that fucking poetry in the sky

That is why. That is the reason. The reason I can walk through an art store’s acrylic paint section for hours, losing time and urgency and even place – because I am trying to find that color

That one color

Or those many colors

 A task that seems utterly impossible

Because a picture … a picture can’t show you the vastness

The bigness

The wowness.

The Kalahari desert is one of the  most extreme landscapes, the harshest of climates

That sun bakes the sand into this brilliant red, and when it peaks out through long, wild grasses that glitter and dance in the Wowness of  that sun as it sets,

We followed twin lines of red parting the tall grasses

Grasses so tall we felt them brushing against the undercarriage of the van

Tickling and bending and breaking as we trundled past

I imagine the trail of broken grass smell

Green

Sharp

Smells that mingle with the dryness of air baked by sun in a vast –

You see the word ‘desert’

It’s just this word

I learned it

I’ve visited

But the word doesn’t mean anything

But THIS desert

And THIS sunset

AND THE WOW OF IT ALL

Reached into me with metaphorical hands

Raked through me like a fine net

Brushed over me like sweet, delicate wind

I mean, I was DELIVERED

I was RECEIVED

I was HELD

I was SUSPENDED

I was TOUCHED, MOVED

I was SHAKEN

I was AWAKENED

I was REANIMATED

I breathed in sweet, unfettered LIFE

And all I have to explain it to you is a language that cannot

And a picture that cannot

Even begin to show you the ENORMITY

Because, what I’m saying is this

RIGHT NOW

Go out into your world

And leave your egos where they are

Just step out of them for a moment

And that MOMENT

God, The enormity of it…

Be like a child experiencing ‘sweet’ for the first time

Because this Wow that we miss

We miss because we’ve stuck ourselves in this world called Protocols

And my heart breaks

Because most of you will still not see it

Not feel it

Because we’ve been taught to shut ourselves up in our ivory towers

‘masters’ of the universe

But I dare you to stand in the desert

Come back from the brink of heat exhaustion

Salty and stiff from evaporated sweat

And gaze into a sunset

And recognize the smallness that is your life on this earth

Because outside your Urbanity,

You are nothing.

And yet, you discover you are everything.

Everything.

PDSD: Post Dramatic Sunset Disorder

 In the Kalahari desert,

I met a King who called me his love
and blessed my path.

We stood before the sunset,
And I felt it down, deep in my soul
Pouring breath into me
Like warm light, liquefied
Slipping into my cells,
Making my blood sing,
Calling me home.

It was boundless

As I am boundless

As are we all,

Always and ever following an endless wave of warmth,

The ever fading, shifting, vibrantly tinted interaction

between light and atmosphere, presence and absence.

Before, I walked as though blind
Blind with Ego.
          with Judgment.
Blind and lost and searching for what has been here, all along and always.

I met a King who peered into me with twinkling eyes

His desert, like a mother, stole from me my wretched sense of self.

Down in that darkness of the soul, I was drowning in a sea of water and wind,

thirsty but for all the salt
I couldn't drink.

My breath was stuck.
I stumbled into the bars of my self-made cage,
Bars called Heartache, Worthlessness, and Loss.
Bars named Lost child, and Lost faith.
It was cage called Abandonment,

named for what had been done to me,
And what I had had been taught to do.

I hid within the familiarity of a prison I named into existence.

But the door has always been open.

I met a King who sat beside me at the fire, took my hand and said,
"Tell me of your sorrows and hurts. I will listen as well as I can,
and if I understand you,
I will offer what healing I have to take with you,
For your journey has been blessed"

I left my sickness on the thorny, desert grass of the Kalahari.
I let it slip from me like a snake too big for its skin.
The call was always there,
in the stillness inside,
the sacred space within that never fails to resonate with the beauty of truth.
Beauty that scours like a coarse powder, scraping away at the comfortable lies and illusions that had padded my cell.

I emerged

Breathless and gasping
as the tears flooded,
Irrepressible and perfectly right

With whose eyes had I been looking but not seeing?

The motherland called me to her.

She called, and I accepted her

in the most ancient language of adoration
Forged in the discordant, perfect harmony of all that has been
And all that will be.

I am here
I live
I breathe
And  with the perfect clarity of a child,
I see that this world made me

In an endless ocean of you’s and us’s and we’s
And I cry shamelessly in love with what I encounter in the stillness.
Peace within that shelters and holds me
Ignited compassion
It fills me up and joyous, decanted love pours out,

daring and unfettered.

I am,

And have always been
In the right place
and at the right time that brought me to this desert

To see this sunset

This one that is all around and in every pore

This one that dies in shimmering grasses that hold the fading light and color like infinite, dancing canvases.

As it ends for me,

I bask in the knowledge that it never ends for ‘we’.

This desert,

Full of life
and love
And the pain of living.

Achingly beautiful, delicately balanced
and as strong as the people who live within it.

I met a King in the Kalahari who called me his love,

And his sunset brought me home.