BECAUSE...

 

All the words keep writing themselves, but it happens more often that when people send messages asking a question about what I’ve written, I have to go back and read what was posted. It doesn’t seem like I have written anything at all. I wonder what the doctors will say as I lay in the nursing home at the not-quite-young age of 32 with a self-diagnosed case of nonduality-induced senility.

“What creates the character?” asks the young man who is working on figuring this out. He has watched “almost the all videos on the nothing TV channel you recommend me. I am knowing more each time I watching.” He is not a native English speaker, and sometimes I love to hear the way English sounds when it is put together like puzzle pieces. Though more and more that is how it always sounds.

I write back that the character was dreamed up, by what I could not say, though more than once in the apparent past I would say "life." But that was really no better an answer than saying everything and nothing or unconditional love. All of us who say there is no answer always seem to have an answer. After all, even unknowing is an answer. I close the computer; I do not hit send.

In the afternoon, Fiona and I are putting away provisions and items for imaginary people in a future story of a retreat. Fiona is listening to Amy MacDonald sing about the Barrowland Ballroom, which she tells me stories of, and can’t wait until things “get normal again” so she can go out and see live music.

It is always these little everyday phrases that trip me up. “Getting back to normal.” The very idea of normal is lost in the distant fog on the other side of the lake. Sometimes it’s like doing mathematical calculations, hearing some words and trying to figure out what they mean in the context of how they are said. When words have no more meaning at all.

Fiona is the daughter of the couple from the village who have brought provisions and done maintenance here for years. Her family likes me, she says, because I am nice to her and support Scottish independence. Of course I do, I saw Braveheart. That’s about the depth of any opinions on the world here, as none are believed or seem to be about anything more real than talking of the Elves in Lord of the Rings.

Fiona used to care about independence, and marched in a rally before we met. But if her parents really knew the kind of influence I’ve been, they would like me less. Fiona says it’s obvious there never were any countries or different kinds of people. All just fairy stories. She is still not sure what it means when some speakers say there are no people at all, but she says it’s clear she is not who she thought she was. She just can’t find anything else that she is.

I don’t say anything about that, and just ask her to put on more music. She does, and The Jesus and Mary Chain are singing “And if I tell you something/You take me back to nothing.”

 ...Yeah….

As the light fades from the sky, I am back on the computer. Two people write to ask why this or that nonduality speaker said this or that. As if I somehow have the answer. Well, I do, of course. It is the same answer the impatient mother gives her child who is asking impossible questions on a long car ride in the summer heat. “Why is the sky blue?” “Why do birds fly?” “Why can’t we stop for ice cream?”

The answer is always the same. The one and only true answer. Ever.
“Because.”
Because…and then no more words. Not “because of” this or that or any thing at all.

Just "because."

“Because the sky is blue…It makes me cry…” ---the Beatles
💓