something happens when you encounter a crowd, drift slowly around it. the pace is still. the rhythm (do you hear it?) is consistent. our body moves, smoothly, as if through water. circling a crowd, do you remember, of sitting and noticing, standing, settled, looking. do you remember it?
--
a slow circumnavigation. settledness. a confrontation. almost a dare, I might say, a kind of soft aggression, an invitation: meet me here, I wanted to say, come at me, or come be present, we are here. can you feel it? you're here too; we're all just pretending not to be, but can you feel it? an energetic invitation amidst this all, like a glacier, slow and heavy. not so much a come-at-me but a come-with-me. or perhaps it was a do-you-dare-to, do you dare? do you dare to be here? (do I?)
the answer is a slow yes, an actually, yes, a fucking yes, I fucking dare, fucking dare me, me fucking daring me, (a kind of ---- letting its way slip out that I might misinterpret as anger but perhaps is some kind of self-power), a kind of why-the-fuck-not, a kind of what-do-we-have-to-lose, the royal we, the conglomerate of us, the kingdom of our objects, the family of our internal systems, why not, why the fuck not, why the FUCK not
underneath it all, I have said, underneath it all, underneath it all, under the stones the beach, under this perhaps the sense of raw being, of life, the texture of it, life, london, this moment of june, or august, of the rawness of the thing we get to feel at a moment, here we are, this is it, both diaphanous and massive at the same time, warm to the touch (heated during the daytime) and paper-thin that you can sometimes miss that we're seeing through this, this presence, here it is, the materiality of it. does it get thicker over the years? more opaque, so that at some point we have cataracts, neither seeing the world but seeing the layer itself? do we know how to focus, take care? can I hold it between thumb and forefinger, hold it up to the sky as if examining a moon, a thinly cut slice of radish, examining translucency and transparency? is it possible?
am I free? I think the question goes, am I free? the answer is yes, yes, yes, I will forget this, but it's yes. the answers are usual I think. nothing to do but to be present. nothing to fix but to feel the things I'm stopping myself from feeling. this is a day for being here and noting what's available, the journey into the self, the journey into the world, all of it. if I want to ask 'are you here?' then it's probably some of me that wants to ask this of myself. am I here, taeyoung? am I here?
is this what it feels like? what did I want? a drumbeat in the distance? a distant siren? something cataclysmic? something emphatic? something to clarify that I'm Doing It? every turn looks like a curve at some resolution, I present in 2016, to a crowd that seems to not understand what I am trying to say.
I want softly to walk around at night with them, is what my heart says. I want to be free from this all. (you are already, a voice whispers.) I want to jettison, to learn how to now, truly, let the connections I cared about settle, to let them fall away. I want to live a life, something with soul, and meaning, I want, I want, I want, I say, and of course the answer is always in the present, that this exists, to notice the energies that are present, that are already here, that I don't need to go anywhere else to find what's already present, and thus I can go anywhere with where I already am, lessons that will return over and over again, ebb and flow, in well-worn words and cliches because the lesson sometimes lies not in knowing the path but by climbing it, well-worn metaphors to describe common questions.
(there's nowhere else to go, you're already in love, T, those doors are NO, Normally Open, all you need to do is nothing.)
the rest of my lifetime, asking: really? but really? but really? but really? but really?
--
what did you find there, what have we wrought, where could we go, what do you know already that you want to jump into, what portends, what beckons, what is around the bend, what paths are unexpected, what does a wrinkle consist of, what is a knot, where did it go when you untangled it, where did it come from, who wants to ask these questions, who wants to answer them, won't they always be here, what will I eat in the meantime, dear, what will we eat?
keep on going, it wants to come out, wants to emerge, let it spin out, spool out of my fingers onto this presence, a moment on the stage, an event to coalesce, keep it churning and going, what might be existent, let's talk about it, a moment to talk, a moment to head into the wake, to confront it, to actually pin it down and look at each other in seriousness, to invite us all inwards, inwards, into the present, into the chamber, the container, we could be here if we wanted to, to stomp my feet to feel the action-reaction of the earth pressing upwards against my foot bone spine to let myself know that I'm here, you know, the solidity of the self, the reality of the present, the groundedness of realness moved not by easy opinion or weightless words but by the solidity of my body and the limits of the self, what's real, what's present, what's truthful, what's honest: to dig into it together. because: why not? what do we have to lose? why not?