Chapter 1 

I spent a long time purging myself while facing the planet until I found myself timing my breathing with the rotation of the planet on its axis. I would breathe in until I saw the other side of Earth, then breathe out as the hidden side came into view. All the while I hurled old-time epithets down at the place, down at my enemies and people I had blamed for one thing or the other. If my thoughts had been thunderbolts the solid planet would have been split apart.

Sometimes I would think for nearly an eternity on all the speculations men and women have had looking up here, in this place, saturated by black and empty. If only they knew! Everything from the primitive to the sublime peopled the dark universe with alien life forms, monsters, space craft, and was the backdrop to dramatic themes of loneliness, camaraderie, courage, even love. I remembered, no I actually saw it take place, the time my friends and I talked about whether love making was possible in the vacuum of space. We laughed. We hardly knew what the activity was much less how it would happen in space. We concluded that there would be no such activity in space, therefore there would be no children born in space. I saw myself, my friends as we were, in real time making this conversation after one of us had heard a radio report. I was happy to see all the things possible that had happened in my life, in the life of the planet. So many! So violent and diverse! So absurd and meaningful! Layers and layers buried into the nooks and crannies of more layers, operating at one time but not recognizing it, shielded from it by strict adherence to some fabrication. Some did not want the people to know the fundament and to realize that all is one, one is all. We lay down our lives forever, an imprint is made, it gains its own form of reality and moves around in its own dimension. There is Christ on the cross, there is Caesar stabbed in the forum, there is the Japanese woman listening to Basho, the wanderer to his cave before the snows come, the kid in Mexico taking a leak out his backyard on and on; after awhile I couldn’t look yet I knew it was all contained in myself. Was I simply projecting what I knew down on the surface of the earth? Or, was it more? It was a happy mystery but I did look long and hard at my own actions on the planet right before I disappeared. And that was still a mystery.

I didn’t judge myself but realized that I would not have lived or done many of the things I did had I known the universe has intimately as I got to know it.

David Eide
January 24, 2014