Matter of fact

So you go for a walk for some rare and distant thing. As you get closer to it, you realize that you yourself have become a rare and distant thing.

That's what you call a kick in the pants. Point of realization. And so you look around, realizing, once you've become your own rare and distant thing, you haven't traveled a mile. Oh, well then, where am I?

So you call out to your buddies. Point of realization. Volume turns to whispers across the vast plains of communication. Standing right in the face of a brother, shouting for all your worth, and all that comes out is a sob. A gasp. A stammer. Do my words fail me? Am I speaking at all? Have I put out my brother's hearing? Have I blinded him? Have I done some wrong? Why do they look at me this way? Do I not make sense?

So one learns to sit still. Folded under by one's own violence, one finds peace. One finds the infinite, the inevitable. One becomes patient. One recognizes the omens, learns to read the world, finds a voice beyond voice- learns to walk again in the garden of the eternal.

At first I was ignorant, guided by humor and the sideways glances of a wild animal. The snarl, the catch in the smoothness of the pelt. The snaggletooth that lets you feel the bite. I was caught and I believed I understood.

The flood of the tundra before me took hold. It's the grip of ice water against your chest, around your neck. I was caught and I believed I understood.

You see, there is something one must always keep in mind. Observation must be shallow in order to be understood. So we sample, we taste around, we shut out the vastness. The thing I call the tundra. We learn very little this way- outside of the flurry.

Language is useless if you have no experience of it. It's not a gift I can give. One can only take it for themselves- by taking that stroll. By wandering into the jungle, looking for that fierceness.

And at a point, the drive you have to know will be matched by the drive of the thing to stay hidden. You will be tested. It is at that critical moment, that beautiful moment, you will know what you're made of. Break past that point... and you'll know what to do at the next one.

There is always a next one, but that's ok. Keep at it.