The blisters on the inside of my rough fingers stung with a sickeningly sharp pinprick of concentrated irritation. I winced every time the wooden handle of the rake slid across the swollen, white bumps, threatening to pop them open at any stroke of the garden tool. I had already gathered several large piles of dead leaves in pointless, dismal lumps of decaying colors and my labored thrusts grew weaker as I questioned the task and all its meaning. “Why are we down here, when we can just go up there?” I whispered aloud. Hasn’t that always been and always will be the question for every age of the human race? Aren’t we always striving and willing for the next plane of content and efficiency, as if our world isn’t good enough the way it is? We will always be trying to make things easier for life on Earth but in the end, aren’t the challenges in human existence what make it worth living? Aren’t the difficulties we face what help us learn, adapt, and evolve in an environment not suited for intelligent life without pleasantries? I looked to the sky and peered into a blinding light we call the sun. It stared into me, seeming to know everything I wanted to without showing me more than a glimpse of the truths we face as curious beings. Suddenly, the image I saw before me appeared to lose its dimension and everything flattened to a world where and when depth-perception didn’t and doesn’t exist. I don’t remember dropping the rake but there it was on the ground and before me, was the painted picture of some 2D portrait. I reached out and brushed my hand across the inky surface, it deteriorated into the air. The wind swept it away and glimpses of pure white appeared behind as if it was what really existed beneath a shell of outer beauty that we see in place of a sphere of nothingness, a blank slate, waiting to be filled by truth. As though it was my duty to sift through the mixed salad of lost discoveries and find the piece of un-diluted tomato in the midst and to repaint the picture of nature in the universe, I started outlining it the way I believed it to be. “A society is to humans as a pride to lions or a school to a group of fish. And just like fish that don’t know they’re underwater, do we really know we’re all there is?”
dude, i think you have been in a new age mind trip too long. that a vacation from it for a little awhile. if you do that, i think you will find some of those answers.
