This morning I awoke with inspiration from a friend:
"This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this, as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed ONE. Self-existence is the attribute of the Supreme Cause, and it constitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters into all lower forms... Power is, in nature, the essential measure of right. Nature suffers nothing to remain in her kingdoms which cannot help itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the vital resources of every animal and vegetable, are demonstrations of the self-sufficing and therefore self-relying soul." -Emerson, Self-Reliance
Inspiration, however, did not keep all day. The day was an adventure, and was excellent; yet in repose, the narrative was prosaic at best. I carried on with the exercise of writing, hoping to capture a modicum of profundity. I typed out into sentence form the notes of today's thoughts, trudged through a post hoping that it would amount to something. As a result of a computer malfunction, the great effort was lost, the auto-save mechanism having froze. In disbelief, I felt like abandoning the effort altogether. After all, the blog has undergone a metamorphosis from documenting the narrative of daily experience to recording personal brushstrokes of thought; at a time like this, the present discouragement and futile attempt at forced inspiration were, on a broader scale, as though the caterpillar was cut out of the cocoon before it could develop wings, left to wither from malnourishment without ever having flown.
There were certainly highlights with their accompanying metaphors from today, as has been true of all days on the excellent adventure. The increasing sleepiness of the bike during cold mornings in high altitude: the demand of adherence to patience and love when it refuses to start, or dies at a traffic light. The Utah mountains along I-80: their uncanny presence dissolving the human sense of time grafted onto the world, and casting the manifold dramas orbiting a human life into the wind as mere trifles, like pebbles swept off their summits. The grazing of a tire shard from an 18-wheeler blowout off of my hip while passing through the Salt Lake City highway: how one moment can alter the course of a life entirely. The small pools of water remaining in the desert sand: a reminder of how we dodged a meteorological bullet over the last few days, and the underlying unpredictability of all we try with false certainty to forecast. All narrative is metaphor, as everything is what it is only relative to everything else. Yet one cannot dwell in profundity uninterrupted; one is always called back down to the ground. And the coldness of the smack into hard earth is sobering.
Perhaps it is the eager anticipation of reaching San Francisco - an impetus for our journey, the reunion with a kindred soul, the symbolism of coast-to-coast, and everything else - that prompts the current fleeting and wayward thoughts. Perhaps it is the hyper-stimulation, each day of the excellent adventure electrifying our being into numbness. Perhaps it is the projection of expectations, and the disappointment in the failure of insipid attempts to meet them. Perhaps it is all of these, or none at all.
In the spirit of autonomy, living only by the words of others eschews the universe within oneself; blindly pontificating the words of one's sages deprives them of the chance of absorption, to be internalized and articulated with one's own voice. Yet, when words are stepping stones that bridge the abyss, they are words to live by nonetheless. Tonight I visited another old friend, the angel-incarnate Rumi, and was nourished yet again by his guidance:
"Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
but don't move the way fear makes you move."
In the thick of the fog, the clarity that surrounds it is not visible. But keep on, and it will come again soon. As I finish typing this, a moth has fluttered by. He earned his wings. There's a lesson in that.
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