THE BRAVE NEW LAND

From glittering abandon, I seem to have been thrust into containment, confinement… condensed into something unreal, something beyond my comprehension. I wait. I look about me… and I wait. Time is still with me, but I seem to be able to feel it now. I wait and I feel. I look about me and I feel. Now I can hear too. A whisper is forming at the tip of my lobe. I can just make it out; it tickles… I giggle. I wait, I look about me, I feel, and now I giggle. The whisper is Truth. It is the truth that I knew of while floating in the space before, while gliding through glittering abandon. The truth feels different now. It feels slow, as it seeps into this place that… I am calling me. I call 'it' me... this place. The whisper is reaching out to me, getting stronger now. I think that I recognize the voice behind it. It is strong and quiet. It is patient. I wait, I look, I feel, I hear, I giggle. I realize when I hear the whisper that I am not real. I realize that I was real befor...

When I was a child, one of my earliest memories was of being isolated on a boiled sheet that had been laid over wall-to-wall gold shag carpeting in the middle of our ranch house living-room in El Toro, California. I did have my brother with me, but the world at large was off limits. We were infected. We, for a brief time, were sporting pulsing blemishes that itched to no end and, with our infantile perspective, had no end in sight. We were told at the time by our most trusted confidant, our mother, that we had the Chicken Pox… We were infected. My brother and I were isolated from all that we knew and our trusted mother had become our jailer. I remember her trying to change the sheet, yelling at us to move all of our toys, our precious building blocks, to the side, off the edge of the sheet. She was obviously flustered and expressing it with uncertain abandon. I was just confused. I mean, if we put the blocks on the carpet, how could we put them back onto the clean boiled shee...

I haven't been able to sleep well this week. So many stresses have been building up over the past few months and it felt like this week was a kind of toxic crescendo in the opera of my life, but really… it was 'all' only in my mind. I have to ask, 'Just what is a mind good for anyways?' All it seems to do is to run away with the latest slop from whatever gutter it happens to be hovering next to. Controlling my thoughts has been such a battle lately. I have even been told recently by my loved-ones that 'all' I do is mope around, evidently consumed with the dread of whatever my mind was dumpster-diving to retrieve. Not so coincidentally, in the midst of the throes of 'just' such a raid, I happened to stumble upon an article that delved into the Jewish concept of why we experience pain and suffering, fortunately putting my mind at ease somewhat. I had been seriously contemplating chucking my kippah and, in the process, God out of the second stor...

Sometimes I forget who I am, where I came from, as I continuously dredge through the unrelenting pressure of this gaseous planet's atmosphere. We were all instructed by the manual, every one of us, to always remember who we are and why we came to this apparently godforsaken place. Yeah, you guessed it, the same manual that is now starting to lose its import, due to all the facsimiles that have been carefully conscribed from it, like a foreshortened version of telephone tag with a slowly receding cosmic view, becoming vaporized as it disintegrates into the pressure, the unrelenting atmospheric pressure. We just weren’t meant to survive here. If it wasn't for this exoskeletal manifestation that I have been glued within, I would have been toast upon my first breath of this poisonous ball, floating in an even more toxic universe. That, as well, is exactly the problem. This exoskeleton makes it possible for me to actually enjoy this world, seeking its pleasure and loving its...