I don't know what I'm looking at anymore
seeing double or nothing at all, awareness week 3
The further I walk,
And the more I struggle,
the more I seem to see
the parts of life
that I was always meant to see.
But,
for some reason.
They never look
As I expect them to.
Today, is today.
and I am finally clear
that there are worlds I will never enter,
and paths I will never take.
but, no matter which way I go
some things
I was always meant to learn
Maybe we choose the lessons
but await the teacher.
I’m sat in a place
I may never return to.
a foreigner in a town
that smells of wet cedar and burnt maple.
Perched in the corner of a room,
shielded from conversation,
protected by customs and languages
that I’ll never belong to.
At the far edge of a map,
I’m yet to understand
an octave away from
the path I’ve walked,
My eyes are filled with objects and items I’ve never seen before
But today
I am met by something
I recognise
and it looks nothing
like what I’ve seen
before.
her.
It’s taken me millions of steps to reach this point,
my shoes are torn,
as are the feet that wear them.
My steps have varied.
some felt wrong,
some felt right,
all of them necessary
I needed those meandering routes to make it here alive.
In this town,
people tell me
”Michi wa michi”
The road is the road.
They’re not wrong.
There’s an honesty in recognising
How long and dangerous
some of the paths are
and what becomes of those who walk them.
Yet, here I stand
after all those steps,
trying to imagine who else
would walk such a route.
Maybe someone
as broken and lost
as I have felt,
or someone at least carrying the scars
that I still believe
can’t be avoided.
But it is not like that.
Because when I look up,
what I see isn’t what I expect.
But it’s uncannily similar
to something
I’ve seen before
I just can’t tell why…
no bloodied feet,
no sooted face.
my eyesight is smudged in disbelief
because while I have seen fire
and come out singed,
what I see in front of me
does not look like this.
I am in wonder.
Beauty, yes.
But I can’t understand why,
Why I can’t help but watch.
stare,
fresh from the path
with the eyes of someone
who has only just begun to walk.
Maybe she’s taken fewer steps.
But how did she find the route.
Did she always know.
How did she get past the fire and snakes
and not carry the same scent
of burnt wood and smoke,
however hard I look
I see no burns or bites.
Perhaps she possesses a wisdom I lack.
Or maybe after walking for so long
my eyes can’t see things the way they are
only the way I’ve been.
I hope the truth is simpler.
That standing in the same place
doesn’t mean we have the same story.
But right now,
I see someone at the start
while I only recently felt ready to stop
The soft jazz folds across the room.
I am lost in the distance
between the bassist’s finger and thumb,
watching his wrist pull the room into shape.
The piano strings land like blocks of tuned stone,
shivering the glass on the table between us.
and for a moment,
I don’t know if it me
or the room breathing.
It’s not scientific,
but when you look at the world,
it becomes clear
that whatever beauty may be,
it moves us
and pulls us together.
But what is it?
There’s a tuning.
Those who have had it,
recognise it,
because it tunes something deep inside,
beyond the gloss of the magazines,
beyond the white noise of worldly desire.
It tunes something amongst the hidden qualities
that form when we’re at our edge,
when the world decides to see who we really are.
I don’t believe that beauty
with all the power it holds
is just about what we see
because when we do see it,
we feel it deeper than where our sight can reach,
Beauty sits inside our most precious memories,
next to the stories we keep buried,
alongside the private skills
that nobody else gets to see,
until you realise it’s only them that can see it.
There is where our real understanding of beauty lives,
and those who recognise that property
somewhere in their lives
understand how beauty works
and how to find it.
There will always be someone there to teach the basics
and to make sure anyone can copy the pose,
but the real material,
the material that cannot be taught
inside our classrooms of life,
is what sharpens the eyes.
The painful parts of reality
are better than any paint stripper on our illusions
Those who have been tested
carry a different lens to see the world,
and those who have not
will never know it exists.
And as I sit here,
after a long path
that began with many
and ended with none,
a face marred by danger,
after nights I survived without knowing how,
I have finally arrived at a point
where I can see,
clearly
And after all of it,
all I see
is her
Awareness week 3
The back roads will bring you into contact
with people you never believed existed,
in places you never thought you’d end up.
We begin adventures
with the strangest people,
carrying the strangest stories.
But.
To meet them,
we have to look past the things we’ve been trained to look for.
Because what takes us further
rarely looks like anything we’ve seen before.
The movies and magazines around us
are not the path.
Social media
is not the path.
They are just the noise around it.
The real path is in the collisions along the way,
whether physical or digital.
Once you get the chance to actually see,
that moment
might be the beginning of it.
Humans hurt and heal in different ways.
Our scars differ even more.
We all come from different degrees of privilege and access.
Every origin has its own difficulties to conquer.
No path is more difficult than another.
We’re just eight billion individuals
panicking and bumping into each other,
late for work,
still annoyed we pressed snooze.
But when we meet,
Sometimes we get the chance to exchange something.
sometimes it’s kindness
Often it’s pain.
But when our hands are out to receive
we tend to get something
that we can’t help but learn from.
Loops and Learning
There’s a Buddhist idea
that we move through the same loops
again and again,
inside this life and beyond,
until we finally learn what the loop is trying to teach us.
The strange part is that the healing we do
is part of the loop as well.
So we never really know
if we’re escaping it
or simply completing another rotation.
Maybe it isn’t a circle.
Maybe it’s a spiral.
From above it looks like we’re going in circles,
but from the side
you can see the climb.
Planets move like this.
Orbiting, yes.
Repeating, yes.
But always drifting forward,
carrying traces of every past rotation
into the next one.
And maybe that’s like us.
Spinning around the same datum
but moving along some axis we can’t identify
Awareness week 4 is next week
Sometimes you need to go backwards to go forwards
I hope
love you loads
R
x
