Where is the sky?
Point to it.
…Chances are you pointed up.
Where is your mind?
Point to it.
… I bet you pointed to your head.
But think about it.
Isn't the sky out in front of you - at the horizon line? When you're standing on the beach looking around you, isn't the sky all around you? If I stood right in front of you, wouldn't there be sky between us? I mean certainly if we were skydiving together, there would be sky between us. So… Is there a place where the sky starts? Where it ends? Does it stop at our atmosphere? Well then what about the night sky? Aren't the moon and the stars part of the sky?
Those stars we see in our starry night sky are millions of light years away and have probably likely burned out by now, but we are seeing a snapshot of what that star looked like millions of years ago. It's just taken years for the light to reach our eyes.
So is the sky just an illusion? Or a collection of gas molecules and astronomical mysteries? Or a log of very old events, like a cosmos history book?
What about the mind? Isn't it the same? Isn't it just non-matter space? If you are still pointing to your head to show me where the mind is, go ahead and put down your hand first of all.
But really - Where you are pointing, I see hair, skull bones, dura mater, neural tissue cells and fluids. I don't see a mind.
Point to your thoughts, your emotions, your memories. Where are they? I've dissected a brain before, and I can tell you… it's all matter. I guarantee that the being I dissected once had dreams and feelings, but they were not in the matter I was cutting open and inspecting. I cut into a brain…. not a mind. So where is the mind? And more importantly where does it go when it's no longer associated with a living body?
I love this sky/mind analogy/conundrum.
Makes me think that the sky and the mind (or as some call "the soul") are just as infinite and intangible yet absolute in their existence as one another.
The Buddhists say that the mind is eternal… just like the sky.
I love to think that Birdie's mind is still here. His spirit… his soul… it's part of the sky now.
(Birdie -Adam Dube - was one of my best friends who drown 6 weeks ago off the island we lived on together once upon a time.)
You know how when you leave a head of garlic in a bowl for a while and then take it out, there is still a smell or essence of garlic that remains for a really long time?
I feel like Birdie's life left an essence behind in that same way.
There is still an eau de Birdie in my heart and in my life.
I miss him pretty much every day and have to shake my head and wash the feelings off of me before they grab hold and suck me down into deep sadness. I almost feel like he's just on a really long boat trip and is still coming back to main land soon.
I guess that's one of the hard parts about loving and losing a pirate.
You're so used to them being out at sea, it's left as a permanent assumption - he'll make landfall again. He must.
I was writing to him a lot after he died… Imagining that the emails would bounce up to the infinite space (where I like to think his eternal mind and soul reside now) and on their way back down to his gmail account, they would cross his essence and he could receive me somehow.
And then I got this weird text message that was totally blank.
It said from "unknown" and the body said "message not found"
It tripped me out but I thought - aw…. it's probably just a weird phone glitch.
Then a few weeks later I was at the doctor's office and thinking of him and suddenly I got another one just the same and I LOST MY SHIT.
I was convinced that he was reaching out to me… that he hadn't let go of this world and hadn't crossed over and he was trying to reach me.
And then finally I decided that if anyone wasn't letting go it was me.
Nevertheless - I got these texts from nobody in the ether space and they are trippy and shook me up.
I also keep seeing snails in the sky - corroborated by my sister and my boyfriend… so I know that they are there in broad daylight… painted across the sky.
Our symbol… the snail.
We were always telling each other to look for snails in the clouds as messages from one another.
It was our way of reminding one another to be our own unique selves - wonderful and weird and authentically us.
SNAIL LIFE
He is somewhere now. I know he is. He's infinite.... somewhere.
I like to imagine that he's in the sky…
Everywhere.
