Go out to the desert.

There are glorious things in this world if you look in the right places, and with this as truth I am underwhelmed by the describable. I am uninterested in the ordinary. Like many others, I have pretended and tried, but under this kind of sunlight it is too obvious.

Here I am forced into pinhole apertures, wholly appreciative of time simply by forgetting it. Does making art out of the refuse of the world help you make art out of the refuse of your mind? I think so.

“I’ve got 24 hours in the day, same as you.”

I have to confess that most things ‘out there’ make absolutely no sense to me. It makes sense to me that they make sense to most people, but that doesn’t do much to alter my standing in my flesh and bone standing in the world.

It is tragic and useless to be mad without genius. If you don’t write your own revolution, you’ll never have one. You can even have a revolution of your own mind against things you only think are true. It’s incredible how much we forget we are permitted by existing to do. You are permitted to exist as you please while doing no harm, with few other stipulations. You are permitted to swing words like hammers into wine bottles, and you can wear the stain of the vine.

“If ya think ya see the future, take it now…”

Is it absurd to think that possibly, some of us are born and carry a limited maximum to our sanity – and must seek out the remainder of it? That some of us simply must rely on finding someone, something, someplace where the rest of it is just hiding like some cosmic ersatz Easter egg hunt where the entire world and summation of your reality play the role of the family’s backyard? Is this the great universal unfairness?

“They” tell you that life isn’t fair. This is true, but I think “they” mean that people will invariably be unfair to each other (which is also true) without an acute understanding of the broader human tragedy “they” imply.

This realization was the spark of cynicism that I had resisted so long. Yeah, it hurts – so don’t spend so long ripping the bandage off. Then move the hell onward. I think it’s possible to be cynical AND joyful AND hopeful. Hell, the first cynics built their belief system to frame a path to enlightenment.

Somewhere along this journey, we will find ourselves left with no other option but to rebuild our foundations and perceptions, and subsequently our own world, out of salvage from personal debris. Perhaps these things will be rusted, dented, discarded and broken – but put back together correctly, they will be strong. Strong enough for high winds, intense conditions and time.

Let me know if you trip over my mind somewhere out in the desert. I seem to have left it there.

I’ve done many, many things in my life that I consider absolutely absurd. I’ve also done many, many things in my life that ‘other people’ consider absolutely absurd. Between the two is a gap that shames oceans. I look back on the perfectly human moments where I’ve made perfectly human mistakes based on either lack of information or clouded judgment. These things are absurd to me, as they defy some universal sense of logic that we’re all equally capable of losing at times.

Okay, maybe not “all” “equally”.

But out here, the absurd is king, pope and emperor. The real absurd. The kind that very few who have lived have truly wrapped their mind around fully. Out here everything I know intrinsically or have learned all comes together given ample room – like a series of highly focused lasers all converging into one super-powerful, super-focused laser capable of shattering planets and I feel fucking alive.

I find it tragically inconceivable and inconceivably tragic that so many people live their entire lives without feeling this. What I find even more tragic are the times in which people who have felt it lose it. This is not a “power over” kind of power, it is not a power that delights in weakness, it is not a power of the ego. It’s the kind of power that comes from fully using your own personal strengths to great result, from allowing the desert to surround you like a return to the infinite potential of the womb, from fully inhabiting your soul.

From knowing that you have filled yourself in such a way that there remains very little space for those things we’ve all too often mistaken for important and given undue amounts of our own power away to.

Can you get it all back? Yes.

The ego of the world outside is a large and ugly thing. The visceral spirit of survival, expression and self-sufficiency, the raw and narrow scope of the word ‘need’ – lends itself to a life focused on the gut of your human experience, – the full use and habitation of your soul, as any of our truly enlightened cultures will tell you. But we’re sorry, you’ve got to find your own way there.

“If I don’t get some shelter – oooh, I’m gonna fade away.”

Go out into nothing. Desolation is a magnanimous teacher. Watch what happens when your perception and surroundings are allowed to be stripped down.

I hear the sound of my voice infused with and carried across the desert air, and it makes more sense. The purpose in my footsteps and words is audible and palpable.

Go out to the desert. You may find, down some dirt path too intimidating for certain vehicles – the place that all of your roads have led you. The path that your father’s father’s father’s father’s father’s feet have trod, through a foreign and dangerous world.

And in this foreign and dangerous world, with very few directions left in which to turn – as we’ve landed ships, conquered land all the way to the Almighty West and built empires now standing at the edge of the world – it all becomes clear.

Now we must go East.