Another day of frustrated ambition

2. The Pivot

I defy anyone to prove this was taken less than a year ago.

Or this was the great answer 42 years ago

That’s the feel of the day. Temporal distortion, accompanied by a melancholy of the Now; from, by, and for Now. As if the trail from the Zendo will suddenly lead to a completely new vista, previously unmarred by your optical tracks:

The ‘Great Happiness’ above

But the trail is long and offers many challenges:

DO NOT LEAVE PATH

It’s slippery with disconcerting loops and lapses:

People do not only leave but they age, so we never meet the same person twice along this river.

As the bear said upon reaching the peak, “The other side of the mountain is what I see.”

Zeno would have made a lousy life coach.

I’m not sure what the purpose of a goal is?

What if the ‘purpose’ is not the journey but the beautiful dead ends?

Embracing melancholy, it too is hollow & empty all the way up and all the way down.

I think a better metaphor may be derived from the ‘Chronicles of Amber’ where in order to travel through the Shadow Worlds you need to walk the Pattern. You need to keep going past the point of giving up, past the point of impossibility, and then only then when everything has failed do you step through.

Returning to where you’ve always been but different.

Home

I was told by a Gurdjieff-trickster who I met when I first vagabonded my way to San Francisco while I was re-negotiating my baseline after a reconstructive psilocybin experience and throwing pebbles into a still pool in the Golden Gate Park’s Botanical Gardens, “It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down, it’s still your path. There is nowhere else to fall but on your path.” Of course, back then we didn’t record the minutiae of our lives.

Not even this will be left.