Needle

We prick. We pierce. We needle. We dig deep and draw down these forces until they penetrate everything: dissolving the limestone of civilizations.

Enjoy this 10-minute read, or listen to my voice reading it via the link at the top of my webpage!

Sometimes the answer comes before the question is even fully fleshed. It comes as the cool water that quiets the boil, the warmth that coaxes the puddle into vapor, the melody that smooths the strangled brow. Before the ache can even find its way into words, the silence answers it, meets it right where it enters the mind and guides it gently to a deeper, truer place. Takes it by the hand and turns it toward a landscape alive with subtle shape and movement, a landscape that is the shadow of the body itself, with tendrils twisting and barbed spheres and ribbons of mist flattening, extending.

This is your life. This is the life that moves in and through your body, that births what you call thought and feeling, that gives shape to the locations and creatures of your dreams: the tenuous tower reaching into the clouds and bending precariously in the wind, the massive waves that curl above the shore, the tiny crevices that open into the earth – and you: clinging on for dear life, crouched tightly to snag a breath, squeezed inside and shimmying through.

And the beings: the broad-winged birds that skim the treetops, the coal-eyed demons with pointed fingers and cold laughs, the massive monsters that scouer the forest, the lost lovers who reappear, the faces and voices that crowd the houses, the cobblestone streets, the cafes – all mocking and adoring. The bridge that gives way just as the shore arrives. The plane that finds the earth just as it disintegrates. The tyrant that passes by just as you crouch beneath the table.

This is your life. This is the life you live beyond your body, the life that plays out through you across lifetimes, wherever the light of your awareness shines, whether on the world within or without, whether on the tangible form or its shadow. This is your home beyond home, the vast realm you long for when the world feels small and lonely. What you perceive is just a shell, a thin crust of earth atop miles of soil teeming with life, with the most unimaginable creatures and archetypal tales playing out in the depths of you.

Let all this slip past your mind like wet clay from your fingers. Fall upon the ground and seep in before the heat of the sun can harden and bind you to the surface. Do not adhere to the details of the story – let the melody of the lines move you, shake you loose from thought until you settle on this: that we have all been living the same story – this story – from the very first time we had this thought: “I am this and that is that. I am me and you are you.” From the very first moment we saw something else as food, something we took inside ourselves that then ceased to exist as anything apart from our will.

We cannot stop this story: it lives through us, strings our lives together, weaves the form that gives us physical presence. But we can acknowledge it. We can own it as a reality we participate in so we are neither asleep, nor complicit, nor reactive – but knowingly nurturing the seeds that will bring new life when the ground again is fertile.

Remember you are more than this. Know that you are fierce. You are metal and you are fire. And a power throbs within you – primordial, beyond anything you can know. Your head is haloed in a wreath of gold and silver threads through which the vibrations of ages descend and extend through your throat, your eyes, your entire being. However deeply you fall, plunge, pierce the earth, your shadow – the fantasies you cling to – these threads follow in your wake, so long as you wrap them tightly around you as a safe line, as a shroud, and they become a sacrament to all they touch. They alchemize the tight, the hard, the twisted and barbed.

We prick. We pierce. We needle. We dig deep and draw down these forces until they penetrate everything: dissolving the limestone of civilizations, cracking and shattering cliffs into piles of gravel like minute mycelial filaments. So too can this presence transform your mind, the tiresome, demoralizing bonds that restrict your reaching so you won’t feel the chill of your distance from the crust of what you imagine yourself to be.

Turn toward the sun, the sun that shines from your very own eyes! Feel the light years it has flown to you, you alone, illuminating a corner of the cosmos only you can see. Feel unfathomable power of your capacity for “yes”, for “no”, for how that makes the world: for you, for us. And imagine that voice of ours speaking not our own short-sighted desires, but the will of Wonder itself, the song that animates the world deep beneath the surface, that makes the shadows dance, that populates inner landscapes with beings of every shade, longing to weave itself through you and this – exactly this – right here and now – and bind you together, inseparable through all time.

What if you surrendered yourself to it – you hybrid being of petty magnificence? What if you allowed yourself to be fabric, woven through with the vibration of ages, in your bones, in your voice, making all potentialities real. What would you speak? What would you sing? What name would you give yourself, give me who stands before you, so we remind each other who we really are each time we meet? What is the sound of the thing we live for, we tend together? What form does it take of shifting texture and reflected light? And can it even be a thing – dark and distracted as the world has become – or must it remain a pulsation, ephemeral, compelling?

Can you see it? Can you feel its plump give press against your side? Can you let it in, absorb it, not to subvert it to your will, but to allow it to transform you from the inside – travel every inch of capillary, of nerve ending? Can you be a good host, make for it a home that gives both shelter and expression? Can you promise never to mistake it for yourself, yet never deny that it dwells within you and that your most precious calling is as its caretaker? And can you keep your word?

Let it lift you from the snares of the mind, the delusions of the stories we tell, the pits we dig pacing back and forth and become trapped within, without sunlight or air. There is always a world that emerges through the walls of any prison we build ourselves – a world of unfamiliar yet comforting shapes and fragrances, subtly unfolding with every breath we turn into blessing. They are echoes of our home and clan, reflections, prayers – soothing and swaddling if we let them. Calling us home to something far more vast than we could ever be – far more patient, forgiving, and wise.

Follow the lights. Follow the lights down the path where the inky shadow loosens just enough to let you pass. Go forward and through. Let your footsteps seed the darkness. Though you will never return, we will know you were there. This is all your life was ever for: pressing into the earth. With your goodness. With your failure. With your best intentions and your unwillingness. Be here. Trust what comes through. Dig deep.

The world has a vision far beyond our sight and we are just one tiny facet. Destruction. Redemption. Just be lucid, as lucid as you can. Even and especially in the fog of delirium. Stand straight. Keep your eyes wide. Your light has come from distant stars, weary and elated to finally shine. You are metal and you are fire. Hold whatever you can remember from beyond. Let it pierce the earth. Let it be the last and only thing you do. Let all other work be done. Because there was never anything else you were ever meant to be.

Machat