About Ashley DaneLife is a snake dance, shedding feathers of urge and keen scales of loss, shedding and, once free, free as it once was, as a baby snake is, free of old skin born anew, reborn, renewed, a new thing resembling everything, like you.
When I say you — you could be anybody, and you are. Your amazing eyes take in the shape of these letters, each symbol, the sound, how they connect to others, grasps even (oh, the miracle of it all) how they unite into words which stand for things, connect together, form thoughts, and you think you’re just reading, with all this going on behind it all, making it happen, and you don’t stop to consider this miracle. Stop. Think about these things. The heart keeps beating, (until it doesn’t) and you don’t tell it to. It knows that you are meant to live, maybe even more than you do. Tirelessly all of these miracles keep being miraculous and you don’t stop to think, and it is never mad that you don’t notice, it doesn’t need you to; its joy is inside itself, the joy that you sometimes remember. If only you knew, all the time, you are a beautiful thing. You, baby that you are, shedding skin that forms around the fruit of your life, scales of time and heartbreak shattered and dancing in the sunlight with crushed spider legs and dust.
…your life, dancing in the sunlight. Dust.
Could anything ever be more perfect than this?
This now, this you. A gift you are constantly unwrapping. Do I know you? You, who are reading this now, are you a friend of mine? An ex or future lover? A stranger who breathes the same air as me, the same as Edgar Allen Poe or Geronimo or Rumi, inhaling and exhaling the fabric of this world you and I can never understand? Who are you? A child of God is who, living in the miracle of now, even if you don’t see it. It sees you, and it knows you. I know you. We are cut from the same cloth, warp and weft, stars in the same sky. How could I not love you? Whoever you are, I do.
The ocean caresses the sand into a tiny wholeness; it knows each grain to be a loving thing with the fierceness of a mother. The light, as it filters through the wings of your hair, is full of information that your eye will know and your heart will trust but your mind will turn away. In the house of the mind a hoarder lives, a dark collector that keeps every little thing. There is nothing that is simply what it is. All things have a history attached. All things have names. If you let go you maybe won’t be you, dreamer of dreams, for God’s sake keep everything you think you know you are, who would you be if you let it go all go let go, I’d like to know and anyway I do, it’s written all over your face, this beautiful baby that loves things, mercilessly, mirthfully, and does not see anything that it is not, is everything it sees and everything it doesn’t.
You are a symbol, a letter in an ancient alphabet, a secret code embedded in a moment of waking. The Mystery is in the corner of your mouth, a tiny acorn when you smile, a thing that everyone wants: the smile, the mystery, the promise of a great oak. Everyone knows you are the bright star flashing across the sky, and they make a wish as you pass. They know.
They know that even now, all time is pressed into one thing which bears the shape of a child’s laugh, the happy snake eating its own self, the gold ring never beginning, never ending. Here it is, where it always has been, and it’s yours. Don’t turn away. Don’t run after false things. Wake up from this dream; you are not alone. Alone is not real, only the opposite of alone is real. Wake up. Don’t fall in love with dreams. Sometimes someone dreams of losing things, something is gone that was there and without it someone is not someone anymore but a diminished thing, reduced by sadness, distorted by longing. In this dream, the shadows run alongside the sun and sing sadly, sad that the sun won’t touch them, lurking at the edge of the kiss that can’t reach them- the promise of the acorn, the mystery of you- the shadow is not you, the dream is not you. Do you know that? The shadow is not you. You are the sun.
I know the sun. I am the kiss I crave. This brings me joy in just that same way beauty makes me want to throw myself off a cliff, every time. It’s the pain of knowing it’s all God, and I am that — how can I tell you? What symbolsletterswordsthoughts could ever contain what that ecstasy is, the unbearable spasm of self remembering? How can I show the horse that the water is good to drink? But even more so, how will the horse know that it is the water?
It is good to beaten into submission, to be thrashed into a tiny grain of fiercely loving wholeness, to caress the edge of the sun where the shade sings. I submit to the ocean and its constant remembering. I am a word, one word, the first letter, the point at which the pen meets the paper. I am not the pen. I am not the paper. I have not been written down.
I could keep writing and writing, except I couldn’t. Each word becomes as meaningless as a snake with no skin, as one tiny drop in the ever-loving ocean. It could be any word, any one word; they all mean the same thing, finally. Just as you could be anyone, you could be you or someone else, but there is only one Truth, and it’s always you. Wake up.
Could anything ever be more perfect than this?
….your life, dancing in the sunlight. Dust.
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