and then glide and float up from the branches to the clouds.”
After a lot of stories like this by the little turtle, the turtle who was a squirrel before started to cry, and it and its entire family exploded into fiery light, then turning into different animals, including one silly human, except for one that was a plant.
Ash As Fire
Upon the second week struggled, alone in a small room—at a point where the senses were lucidly melting and flowed as liquid, blending at times together—something occurred that is not expressible.
Different sized natural wood and herb incense sticks had been burning, but it was without realizing it that the amount and frequency increased until the little room was full of thick smoke.
Sitting in a position overlooking the window’s night sky, with a pool that was the endless view of lighted houses and streets, the vision occurred of a pattern—pieces of one at first—then complete; and incense was picked up, and the pattern began being branded, done slowly by pushing the burning ends of the incense sticks of different widths into an arm.
After the entire pattern was complete, there was a deep exhale and a long but undetermined amount of silence that was not noticed. Then, the memory of the burning skin falling away as ash finally ended the struggle of the past two weeks and some of the previous struggle of life.
In the next weeks as the wounds tried to heal, an infection grew. The pattern on the arm turned to a mess of rotten flesh. And in the moments before death, another vision came of the joy of life.
Wave Goodbye, Wave Hello
While a man is in the ocean water, enjoying the feeling of waves moving upon him, a dead sea turtle is carried within a wave and strikes and kills him.
In a house nearby, there is a woman looking up the best way to make gravy. Satisfied that she has a good grasp on beginning to understand, she goes for a walk on the beach.
The sea turtle has been carried back to the sea and will later wash up further away. But the man washes up within a couple dozen feet from where he had been before he entered the water.
The walking woman sees him and recognizes him from a recurring fantasy, which brought great pleasure to her for some years by this time, of a man she thought didn’t exist. As she begins to be upset, she has the fantasy again but with another man. And then she never has it again.
Meditation On The Smiling Beautiful
As he passed through the crowds of people that appeared as only more crowds, he felt agonizingly alone and angry because of it. But he didn’t know to where or towards whom his anger was directed. He kept moving through the people and felt brutally more and more torn apart. There were so many happy people with so many other happy people that he saw; his distance from being this too devastated him. His painful sense of his own destruction continued through thoughts of suicide, violent pure hatred, and absolute dread turned to crippling numbness, until something within him changed. He was left only with a glowing happy frown and a shining sad smile.
He tried to figure out what this meant as he quickly walked away from the crowds to leave. Then, as he walked, stepping hard upon the ground with his fast moving feet, while not stopping or even slowing down, he looked back at all the people and saw things in another way while in the same moment feeling a complete sense of calm.
The Man Who Held His Breath And Became A Cloud
Everyday he said out loud to himself the same thing while he was getting ready to leave his apartment. Before he said anything, though, he would look around and laugh. What he saw around him was an apartment shaped like half a donut, the whole of it, other than a tiny, port-a-potty-sized bathroom near the front door that bulged slightly towards what would be the donut hole, was one curved hallway slightly wider than narrow, with a kitchen in its center conceived in arrangement just well enough to walk through, and at the end of the hallway an oddly square-shaped and small bed that, when put into place, was pushed tightly against each touching wall. What he said was “One day I will dunk this place in coffee and eat it.”
On this day, on his way out the front door, with the front door swinging in, striking the out swinging bathroom door that he’d left open, he said what he always says and walked out to a busy sidewalk full of people—but only a-block-and-a-half later realizing that he hadn’t been breathing since breakfast when he thought it would be fun to see how long he could hold his breath, timing himself during the first ten seconds then forgetting and doing everything he normally did. So standing in the right-side part of a left-side sidewalk walkway, with the many passers by either annoyed or oblivious to the obstacle of his unmoving body, he wondered how he finished his breakfast without breathing. Then he wondered how he spoke without breathing—and after some other wandering wondering, finding his fixation focused on how he was alive at all.
As he stood there, as he watched the movement of the people, he saw a woman walking quickly somewhere begin to slow down. Following her slowing motion with his eyes, he watched as she began to look as if she were a wax-figure creation rather than a living human being. As her movements stopped altogether while still standing, she began to melt just as wax would melt. After seeing this with strangely little thought in his mind about what was happening and why, he then looked around in the street and saw that everyone had stopped moving and was also melting. He said nothing to them or himself as all of the skin, hair and other people parts, as with the clothes, became liquid and flowed in colored wax seas—a slow running over his feet, his ankles, up to his calves, splashing waves upon knees and thighs.
He noticed heat now and a lulling inside him, feeling faint then heightened in every sensation of his body to where even each hair on his wrists tingled through his spine and felt like light shining from the depths of his flesh, wrapping around his body and then wrapping around the entire world to where he could feel himself within many other people in many other places as well as others in him. As he felt this, while still standing in the same spot on the sidewalk in the sea of colors, a bolt of lightning struck him from the clear sky and evaporated him instantly—then he lifted as vapor to form the single cloud in the day’s sky. The cloud stayed completely still in the sky until evening; then, in time, the wind pushed it around the world twenty times before it lost form and was no longer possible to see.
Workforce
There was a woman who had to work. She did not like her job, and she thought that all jobs were mostly, beyond any practical purpose any one job might have, means by which people became unhappy, the many varied ways that fill lives up with work for the sake of doing work instead of something that was or was at least related to something meaningful.
While it is unknown if she ever changed her mind completely, later in her life, a young man who was out somewhere one day, and who was himself at an intersection of circumstances where he was trying to figure out what to do with his life, met her, remembering for the next twenty-five years (the rest of his life) what she told him (though telling no one).
What she said to him was: “The way that I was able to bring together my anger for having to work with my feeling of certainty in knowing that there was something more meaningful that could be done instead was that one day I saw in my mind everyone in the world, everywhere—working—even those that couldn’t or hadn’t worked. I saw all of them all at once and then separately in what I would have to think now looking back on it would take forever—but in what was then only a few moments; at first, everyone I saw worked in fields, then in many offices both fancy and not, then in rural country stores—all of them knowing each other’s work and understanding what it is to do it; some of them were then angry at others yet some were then no longer angry at ones they had been angry at—though I did not understand why. After this, I saw everyone experience more kinds of work and many of these kinds of work throughout long stretches of time, throughout long traditions. There then came a point within the time of all of this when I realized that the people were no longer working; and also somehow no longer angry or not angry—they wer
e full yet opened up in a way I had never known or seen, ready for what was happening to them then. Although, I could not figure any of this out either until it became clear to me that each of the people, through what was experienced, then created a way to live that both took into account everyone else but that was also a unique contribution of themselves in a way that had meaning beyond simply working, even if they could not always choose the kind of work they would do.”
The man who had been young at the time of meeting the woman remembered that the woman said that this is what she tried to create with her life and that through the years she had come very close. The man did not remember, however, what other things the woman said, where he met the woman, or anything else about her.
Street Smarts
She had met him while walking down one of the city streets that come off the largest artery that leads into downtown from the direction of where she lives. The street she walked leads to an area of the city that was once full of busy and well known shops and restaurants but in the past few decades had decayed yet also opened itself up as the home of many that have lived and still live distant from