Out of Prison

A road you've known all of your life--you know every pothole, every turn--you can walk down it with your eyes closed. But it has changed, little by little you've begun to deconstruct it, dismantle parts of it, mostly the familiar parts you've tread upon all your life. You throw them to the wayside, piece after piece until you notice that the heavy parts of your road are gone. The dirt is soft underfoot, and you feel joy! After all, you've unearthed a path to peace.

You plant a daisy in the earth, that you grumble should have never been covered by blacktop in the first place. You feel a deep parental love as you watch your daisy grow and bloom. You rest there blissed out with it until its beauty begins to fade, until it begins to die.

Suddenly, you awaken (again), and find yourself sitting on a decimated path. You look for order in it, but all you see is the fact that you've destroyed it! You tell yourself that no order is good, to accept the choas, but you can only think that you are still just on a stinkin' road, paved or not.

The daisy is dead.

Here is where it gets tricky--the moment when you ask yourself, NOW WHAT?! and you just don't know what to do.

You sit idle because everything you used to do down the road doesn't have any purpose. You certainly can't drive down it anymore, and walking, well, there doesn't seem to be much point to that either, because you finally realize that you don't have any place that you really need to be. But you know that sitting there is useless too. Every possibility is answered with a why bother?

So, you realize with a tinge of panic in your gut that you've broken down any structure that has ever meant anything to you, the scaffolding upon which you've built your life. And now you find yourself walking down a dirt path feeling like a clown, wondering why you would bother to participate in any charade--finding the people who make up the chorus silly in their overzealous participation--even the neo-bohemians, whom you sort of revered.

Here it is where the mind comes in subtly to torment you, but you don't recognize it immediately because it is taking you down the other side of the mountain. Now you are not prey to all of your conditioning, but rather to your self-inflicted madness of living in a world that still believes in itself.

For the first time you truly understand why we have arms and legs that move us, why we have a propensity to want to do. And now what you always thought was rather silly, like running just for the hell of it, doesn't seem so bad. You get that in the illusion, you must keep moving, because even if you are headed down the other side of the mountain, you can fall victim to the ego-mind--even if you were certain you'd shed it in order to reach the top of the mountain.

And to succumb at this point in the journey would be ever so sad, as this is the moment when your heart could truly open to spirit and to life, where the two could integrate to exist one within the other, and you could live with your head in the clouds and your feet planted on the ground--where you could finally experience a love that transforms yourself and the world at large, but have no need for it.

Yes, you must keep moving, because to be free of believing your thoughts is only the beginning of the journey, like getting out of prison. There you stand at a threshold with a whole life to live, and with no idea how. You only know that you'll do it differently.