sea of chaos

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Scenting the wind rising up the slope from the valley, I sense an uncanny disturbance, like a transluscent flicker from something far away but big, something impending. My cotton sleeves ripple and I hug my knees tighter, alert now to the sky deepening beyond the mountains to the distant southeast.

I am nested in a tucked-away corner of my garden, beneath the spread of a large juniper bush, the kind any kid treasures. Here I become a woodland creature, sensing as each moment unfurls unquestioning, all antennae alert for any clue to the perennial question:

What is going on here?

By what stretch of what imagination can we create a piece that fits this puzzle of here and now?

I never thought I was asking too much. Just this one moment, after all...

My mind ruffles through memories of impending doom like a deck of cards, searching for a match to the current input-array. I have been here before, I know it.

I lean into these associations, tacking into the wind so to speak, honing in on that vague resonance. Then a familiar crackle transforms the sky into a kaleidoscope burst of mirrors that quickly reorganize into a new perspective.

I see a far-away ocean of storm, its surface a swell and chop of currents driving hard from the deeps, slamming the surface from seeming nowhere, flinging wild spittles of froth and foam that turn to needles in the stinging wind.

As I look closer, I see the froth and foam are actually countless individual people, trapped in tiny bubbles as they contort in desperation, striving to accommodate the chaos buffeting them hither and yon. The entire surface of this tortured sea is an agitated soup of them, beseechiing and cajoling and demanding and letting loose their mighty rage to give voice to their utter, abject confusion and despair.

I see them struggling in tangled webs of fear, spinning their own coccoons that harden into comfortable certainties.

I see that Fear is their master, and they dance on strings.

I see that they can't be saved. But more important, I see that they don't need to be. Each and every one of them, despite their obvious predicament, appears magnificently equipped to sail this sea of chaos, to find safe harbor, even as they know it to be true. But instead they jam the throttle and spin in circles, encased in their own perceptions and dancing a blindfolded two-step with apparitions of Fear.

Fear. The true monster of the Deep. Hell, the only monster of the Deep! And itself only the shadow thrown when our backs are to the sun...

I set the part of me that wants to understand everything to noodle on this as I refocus, center and scan my secluded eyrie for threat n this real-time and space. 

I am reminded of the many eyes and ears about, for whom my presence is a major feature of the landscape, of whom I have nary a clue. I attempt to attenuate my nervous system to theirs, to extend into their sensory array, and am left feeling even more alone, as if some ineffable presence with a zillion eyes peers at me from everywhere, from behind some invisible barrier I cannot yet intentionally breach...

Even so, I see both my central and peripheral location within this configuration of awareness. I sense the infinite awareness both outside and inside of me, completely impersonal in its knowing, unconditional in its becoming, perfect in its reflection and merciless in its love and in its unwavering demand to love... I wonder at how each infinity collapses so easily to an anomoly, a paradox folded into zero and back into infinity/eternity, with the slightest shifts of attention, like a transparent cube if you look just right.

But mostly I frown as the crackling black vortex beyond the valley rim stirs the air, bringing a hint of acrid smoke from a rubbish pile upwind, and a whiff of something else, something barely discernable, a whisper of warning, an ominous undertow.... I gather my loose cotton throw around my shoulders and peer from my hooded place, pondering my perrenial question:

What is going on here?
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