24.

A change of scene, seems to make no difference, perhaps the change happens too gradually, too continuously. Seems to make no difference but how else could you be coming home again, & with the sun at perfect strength behind your eyes, the real-rose tinted spectacles. Perhaps the only real spectacle there is: homecoming. But when the aliens arrive, which is to say return, there are no great crowds gathered to welcome them, no confetti clouds blowing around their ships, only your open heart gone sea anemone in all its delicate strangeness, only the question of what all this is, & the mysterious knowledge of the answer, a feeling unspeakably gentle, the spell to lift all spells.

There is something here now, whether I like it or not. I mean that previously I have worried about investing too much in any particular earthly location, tying myself down, but also making what I felt would be a grave error: conflating what really matters with any particular state location person time or thing. Well, there is no conflation, the centre is everywhere, but nonetheless something is happening here & I would be a fool to deny it. I shall be a fool to enjoy it, too, but there are fools & then there are fools. None of this is big & I still wouldn’t make the mistake of calling it visible but to me at least it is palpable. However humble it may be, or even feel the need to remind itself of being, one mustn’t underestimate the magnitude of calling for peace in oneself & hearing the answer: there is no other power. No power over this, no power over you that know this, no power over us. Indeed it sounds very negative, it is a power we do not have, such power as has the flower we might trample underfoot: the power not to spring back. The force of being completed, which says not that everything is over but that we’re only just getting started. Perhaps always, in a way, surely there is plenty room for tragedy here as peace of course is also beauty. Beauty is always a little melancholy, just as true happiness is never without a tear in its eye. We don’t grow old in such beams, we are born ancient. This event is the only moment there is: may your life contain many such uncontainable not-things: only what we’ll never pin down can set us free.

The greater the illusion
The stranger shall salvation appear

There is no normal here
For it is no ordinary

o u t s i d e