Colorful images seep synchronistically at the margins of my meditating mind. Shadows dance on the back of my eyelids. I open my eyes. The sweeping sound of rain pitters against the paned glass. The sky leaks onto the earth like a faulty faucet. I turn my eyes to the squinted blinds and observe: muted silver carpets of rolling moisture blanket the upper atmosphere and heather the heavens. My mind baths in this stillness.
I think about the work ahead of me: fifty pages of writing within the next seven days. No easy task. The thought of it wrenches my gut.
My existence is binary; my mind, on or off. It teeters at the peak of propensity. Like a push car, once momentum is gained, it is an unstoppable force. Without the initial force, it lays unstirred, waiting, dreaming in quiet desperation for an impending impetus.
When I walk, I like to think that the world moves around me, like a standstill treadmill. The universe hinges on my perspective. All change is a discontinuous illusion extending from the reticent reaches of awareness. Life is but a recall of disingenuous memory. Labor and difficulty, a figment of flouncing imagination.
Warmth emanates from my underside. I lay prostrate. My supine stare fixes on the fan as it spins sedulous waves of coolness into my leeway of leisure.
I don’t have anything to say. I suppose my mind drifts to past relationships, with family, friends and females. Work, school, play.
Lovers. What is a lover? These intimate bodies are too numerous to value seriously. They multiply and divide and subside. What makes a lasting lover? The mark of friendship is the foundational formulation of any marriage of minds. Lovers are nice, but that’s about the extent. Friendship is much more rare. Much more loving and supportive and understanding. There’s substance that goes beyond the intimacy. That is how I judge these matters. Substance is to be prized above all else. The aesthetics of romance incite the passions, but the passions are prone to whither and change. Substance, real substance, principally endures. There isn’t sufficient time to spend chasing shadows and ‘licking the earth’, as Pascal puts it. I value a person’s values. That is appreciable substance.
William Dare 