A stone was thrown into the dark. Who can say where it came from or where it is going? Observing closely, it does not appear to be moving, but one million five hundred thousand miles per hour appears slow when you travel over a great enough distance. At that speed the stars do not even flicker as the stone, hidden in shadow, passes by. Like a ball running off the edge of a table, the stone begins to fall. Careening down the invisible slope of an immense cliff, the frozen stone suddenly erupts — engulfed in ever-expanding ignition. The suntoucher, caught in the arc of the sling, roars in a place where there is no air to carry the sound. As its path bends, clutched in the powerful grip of the light, the stone grazes an infinite weight trying to pull it out of the sky. Tongues of flame reach out, beckoning the stone hither, but velocity is a measure of defiance. The stone shudders as if to shake apart, the moments compress into a standstill as numbers exponentially fill the calculation until, like an ice shelf calving, the equation falls to pieces. The star’s fingers slip as you turn away — free. The fire ebbs, the ember cools, shedding heat as you fly, until you disappear once again into the night.
The forms of you, from your visible features to the patterns of your thought, are the product of three hundred thousand years perfecting a you that first began four billion years ago. This planet was still truly young when you first came into being. The lithe vessel you inhabit is suffused with the secrets of twelve thousand human generations, a temple built on the peak of a mountain of hundreds of millions of generations before that. In the time it took to craft you, the grand canyon could have been carved out two hundred and thirty five times, and Mount Everest would have arisen sixty-six times. At your beginning, if you had looked up at the moon, it would have been two and a half times larger than it is now, because it is farther away now than it was. The moon’s face was different then. The basaltic lava seas that scorched its surface are younger than you.
If the human body consisted only of the parts that can feel, which is to say that if it was only the mind with its outreached tendrils of nerves, a person would look a little like a jellyfish. But this apparatus needs fuel and mobility to survive, and thus the meat-suits. The relative fragility of a human body is off-set by its capacity for ingenuity and generation. The precise genetic craftsmanship of twelve-thousand mothers who made love and screamed their way through labor would eventually arrive at the exquisite “I am” of your self. Now, look at your hand, palm facing toward you. Move your fingers in a curling motion and watch the subtle movements of the tendons and muscles under your wrist. The amount of effort that went into self-designing that very subtle and precise mechanical operation is measured by scales beyond the current frame of human imagination.
But who are you, wanderer?
The four billion year old organism that you are has been changing, reacting, and adapting at every moment of your existence. Your whole being is informed by the entire universe around you, and therefore you are, in some way, a response. Life asked a question and you are one of its answers. The original question that led to dancing cannot be articulated with modern language, but you still carry its answer. The human mind is easily crowded with questions, but dancing was a way of becoming simply answer — every moment a question, every movement a response. The flow is in the simultaneous reception of the questions and seamlessly generating their answers. The rain dances were not asking where the rain was, nor were they asking for rain to happen. They projected the answer of rain - the dance was simply the vehicle to unify body and consciousness into the full human expression of rain.
Music was a natural collaborator and concomitant of dance. Rhythm, pitch, and dynamics provided a mathematical framework that could be immediately understood on an instinctual level, so that the seamless flow could be supported and sustained. Furthermore, multiple bodies could synchronize, which was beneficial to ceremony, as well as to enhancing the liberative qualities of inclusivity within the state of playfulness. Like dance, sex is always caught somewhere on a scale between ritual and creative play, and both benefit not by choosing one side or the other, but by enveloping as much of the entire scale as possible. To be All — that is the subtle instinct that our nature yearns towards. The brain is trapped in a skull, the nervous system in a body. It must do something in order to achieve a greater sense of self. There are many things it can do on its own, but that activity while engaged with others is the nature of intimacy. To dance, make music, make love — there are answers that emerge with others just as there are answers that emerge alone, but arts are the symbols of our yearning to be more than the sum of our parts. The beauty and the terror is that the answers are not the same for any combination at any given moment,. Every moment has its own answer.
That urge to be All, to perpetuate an expanding sense of self, is the root of all mysticism. If the nervous system could grow roots that extended beyond bodies and plug into every atom of the universe, they would. Religion is the ritualization of this urge for reconciliation, but the human concept of god/dess can be as harmful as it can be helpful. Sacredness as a concept is useful to convey meaning, but can all too easily be wielded as a blunt instrument to take meaning from others to virtually boost the confidence of the wielders. The aim must be to perpetuate reconciliation, each individual creating meaning by revealing their answers, each in their unique way — but not at the expense of the others, as much as that is possible. Every creature has four billion years of credentials to justify their existence, and their own answers to give. Likewise, every creature has a responsibility to make of themselves the best possible answer to each moment.
Where creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected, and play is the freedom to create, creativity and play go hand in hand. Ritual is the discipline to refine and improve creative activity through the action of memory. But memory runs deeper than the conscious things that can be remembered or the activities that are tried. The pull of the moon is woven into your blood, ancient languages are etched into your bones and the dance-like memories of an intimate touch are stitched into your skin. All of this experience, generated through the action of living and borne through the ages, is the self-created meaning we carry on our quest to remember what it was like to be All. The mystery is that sometimes you can meet someone you have never met before and recognize them for exactly who they are — undistorted, flawed yet perfected, remembered yet unknown. The moon-affected blood moves in tandem, the bones whisper their secrets to each other in ancient tongues, and a knowing touch can ignite a frozen stone no matter the dark it traveled through. When you look into that love, you find the universe staring back, a savage immortal peering through the diaphanous veil, sizing up your answer.