The Isness

The Wall was The Wall.

The Wall had been created for a single purpose and its purpose would be known. Or it would revisit the path until the lesson was learned. This was the nature of The Wall. There was nothing more to it. And there was everything to it.

Beyond The Wall was The Song. Some said The Song was the true voice of the world, but there was far more to it than that. To hear The Song was to be reduced to nothing and become far more than could be imagined. There was an infinite beauty to The Song and an unfathomed joy. The Song was light and it was love. The Song was everything.

When Garth hit The Wall he had no awareness of travelling towards it. And yet there The Wall was and so too was he. In the aftermath of the collision he had no idea of who or what he was and could not bring himself to look upon The Wall to discern its nature or at least try to work out why it had chosen to be built upon the path of his life. He was not alone in this. He was all alone in this.

As he lay dazed and confused in a pitiful stupor of self-inflicted pain, the duality of life opened its maw and it bit down upon Garth, leaving a gaping and ever so painful wound. He felt that it was incumbent upon him to hide the wound for it exposed his shame. Instinctively, he protected his shame and in doing so he nurtured it in the darkness of his fertile being. This he did in favour of being himself. He chose instead to dance with his shadow. A powerful ritual mirrored by so many over the ages.

There was a precedence and a pattern to this dance of Garth’s. A faithful ritual of lies and a sacrifice of energy to the shadow. He had been blindly guided to this wrongdoing by the multitude. A herd lurching this way and that. In his innocence and vulnerability, he had sought its protection. If he remained within the midst of the herd then he need not worry. Within the bosom of this crowd, all he did was worry.

The ritual of Garth’s life was preordained. He entered the temple of his parent’s home as a sacrificial lamb. Always the sacrifice failed to land. His worth dissolving in the grey of ingratitude and confusion. A crushing wheel turning in a cycle of relentless destruction. His voice joining the discordant screams of the many. Chaotic noise to drown out the truth of life.

The wheel was illusory. As all of this facsimile of a life was. A brittle construct to hide the way ahead. A cloud of imagined fear that served as a warning. Fear of a darkness that must be faced if ever a life is to be lived.

And so, Garth hit The Wall yet again. This was the nature of the wheel. There was only pain, and pain only ever begat more pain. Garth made of himself a receptacle of that pain and his lot was to bear it with a smile and a wave. Pretend that it wasn’t happening and maybe it would go away. Wishing it away with the momentum of what he had been convinced was living. And so the wheel turned and The Wall readied itself to administer another unheeded lesson.

Each time The Wall presented itself, Garth slammed into it and experienced a devastation that threatened to end him. Always weaker since his last encounter with the immovable obstacle. Refusing to budge from the ritual he’d embedded as a belief system even as it proved itself to serve him so badly. The message he took from The Wall; life was futile. There was only pain. He yearned for happiness and chased it this way and that. Fancied that he glimpsed and tasted it in the most absurd of moments, but to hold that happiness for more than a fleeting time was not for him. He was not worthy. Somehow he had lost his worth before he had even begun. Had it spirited away so that his existence was one continual punishment.

Still he tried. Fleeing a corrupted past and chasing the promise of a future intent on illuding him. Another ritual of pain. To languish in the past and wish for a better future. He was the tainted meat in a sandwich of anxiety and worry. A dish fit only for the bin.

Eventually, Garth fell in love. Invested himself in another. Gave everything he had. Deep down, he knew that this was an attempted escape. He longed to jump ship. Find another passage to a better future. He cheated on his wife from the very beginning, placing impossible expectations upon her. Distorting her into a creature she could never be. In return, she cheated on him with the person he had considered to be his best friend.

Betrayal was the most dire aspect of The Wall. The cruelty in the derailment of his life flayed him alive. He was a walking wound. Raw and bitter with the unfairness of it all. He contained a cancerous anger. The pain of it drove him into a spiralling madness. An abnormality of feelings that boiled his insides and had him spitting words of bile.

Now he eyed a jaundiced future with red tinted glasses, whilst his past gnawed at the remnants of his shattered heart. He was the middle ball in Newton’s Cradle. The mob was flying through life without a care in the world. The success of their lives crushed him with every passing tick of the second hand.

This he understood, was the ritual of life as had been handed down to him. All he could do was to continue within the pincers of past and future. Blame his parents for the poison chalice that he drank from again and again.

Following The Wall of betrayal, his children dwelt in a space beyond his failure. Another pain-filled ritual that he never thought would be his to bear. Every other weekend he met his daughter and son, trying to understand what it was that they were doing together. Resentful strangers dancing to music they could not stand to hear. They endured each other’s company as they knew they must. Children with two men in their lives, but no Dad, and so no Mum either. The imbalance of their life tipping them ever downwards. A further rejection of the ritual presented to them, but they could see nothing to replace it with, so they embraced it that bit tighter and huddled in the herd hoping for the best. Never being shown how they might attain anything approximating the best.

When next they met, the bright intensity of the light of The Wall burnt Garth’s eyes wide open. His hateful pity pinned him to the moment of his downfall and at last, as he fought with himself in an anguished battle to the very death, he held himself accountable for all the choices he had made, even as he convinced himself that there had never been any choices available to him. He had nothing left and he felt his nothingness so acutely that he drifted above his pain and in this death was when he discovered his isness.

In this new state of being, he looked about him and in his past he saw only ruin. He gazed upon the despoiled landscape of what had gone before and saw it for what it really was.

I can’t undo it.

He uttered these words to himself and felt a release in the saying of them. There was a time that he would have looked towards his future with hopeful expectation. There lay the elixir. A fix-all for all that had collapsed in his life. But in the devastation of his past he saw a reflection of only more to come. A broken world without end. A world only he could change.

In the despair of nothing, he considered the potential for that required change. Saw another way. With nothing to lose, he relinquished his grasp on an investment in a ritual he’d never once thought to question, let alone understand. Here within him was true alchemy. And he knew he had the wherewithal to transform the mud of his existence into something precious that would shine for all eternity.

As he began the work of removing the old rituals to make space for what was to come, he let go of the illusion of past and future. All this left him with was the now. He looked upon the ground beneath him and thought about the moment he was in. An ever present moment in which he could continually be. He smiled as he felt this being of his. Not for the first time had he done this, but this time was deliberate and in its decisiveness it was enduring. He stilled the noise of his thoughts and went to the beyond. The place where he had always truly been. Waiting. Waiting to be seen and to be heard. Waiting to live and create something of meaning with his worth.

Garth welcomed himself into being. His rebirth was the only real birth. He did not need anyone else in this homecoming. No one to bear witness to his awakening. Everything bore witness to him as he bore witness to the infinite. He was the mirror and no longer would he feed the dark shadow of himself. As he broke that painful and destructive connection he felt the sunlight illuminate him in a way he had never experienced before. He became aware of the entire universe and at last he understood that was why he was here. To be. Only ever to be. He was a unique moment in the isness and oneness of being. It was high time he experienced the joy of the miraculous, as was always meant.

Garth accepted his nothingness and in that acceptance he became everything. He smiled. The smile an expression of his newfound serenity. In the most difficult of times he was at peace. No more would he bang an empty pot and drown out the truth of himself. No more would he throw himself into the ghost of an unreal future in order to escape chattering thoughts of a misspent past.

Time to live in the present and be himself at last. As he let go of the illusory ritual of what he had thought was his life, he opened himself up to what always was and always would be. He tasted the colours of the music that played in his very being and swam in a profound joy that at last brought him to the peace he was always supposed to dwell in. There was no more pain. Now at last he felt everything and revelled in the lightness of it.

Time ceased to be a wheel that ground him down, and in this place where he had always belonged he saw another wall. An impossibly beautiful wall that spoke to him of belonging. This distant wall swept around. Encircling him in his garden of peace. Embracing his isness. Defining and protecting him. This was his boundary. Within it, he made sense and he experienced the isness of life. Beyond it was the noise and chatter of dark chaos. No more would he clash with his own walls. He understood them now and he knew what he must be.

Himself.

In this moment of true understanding he heard The Song rise up within him and found himself in the joy of it, unnoticed tears bathing him in a baptism of becoming. Here was home.