Swimming To Antarctica

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everywhere I turn it seems like I'm looking at the end of things. I feel caught up hard in the gears of the world. My kid is having a baby any minute now and up the street my grandparents are careening toward death at an alarming rate. 

The world is a magical place, but it's a mistake to think it has a personal regard for you. For any one of us.

i am all the time swimming in the waters of deep time, of limitless space, the cosmos, the utterly, incomprehensibly vast, and the vanishingly tiny, too. Quantum mechanics. String theory. Quarks and muons and the elusive Higgs boson. dinosaurs and plate tectonics, evolution, heredity, epigenetics. The nature of things. 

as if to soothe myself. not for any other reason than just to try to comprehend it. As it is. As it seems to us from here.

but i can't live in deep time or deep space. i can't be a cowboy or an astronaut. i can't hunt with a tribe of Neandertals in some french wood.

i got this tiny handful of years and these few beloved souls around me and this is the secret of it. 

what is it. to love without reservation or regard for the cost of it. to be stripped of every tender mercy and be ground up in the jaws of the great machine, and see your loved ones ground up, too. and to yet love, and to begrudge none of it, the grief and the pain and the measureless sorrow of it.

for you are given the great bounty of it as well. and free to do with it what you will, in whatever manner you choose. for as long as you've got the stage.

i don't know what the hell i'm talking about.

*

i claim i want peace but i seem to strive against it in my bones.

*

you want to be equal to what's asked of you. 

that's true.

i don't want to be found lacking.

*

namaste.

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