Elementals, Branch of my River

I am obsessing today, but mostly I am flowing. While, as of yet, I am not a lotus position person, I have been 'meditating' on a particular phrase, and since this phrase relates to my yesterday and my tomorrow, I'm going to share it, and then, ramble on about it.

You can't step in the same river twice

We all, myself included, like to delude ourselves into thinking that we are masters of our own destiny. Nothing is further from the truth. The very nature of the universe, not to mention the infinity of it, precludes us from having much of an effect. It's that tiny speck of sand in a vast ocean thing. Since I accept the premise that we are all connected, receptive in varying degrees to the universal swirl of energy and possibility, it follows for me that all we can really master is ourselves. If you don't accept either of these statements, there's no point in reading on.

What we do, to a certain extent, have control of is what we do with the containers we are given and their accompanying primal instincts. We can choose when to eat, when to work, when to fuck, when to shower, when to kill and when to heal, but the fallacy of caring for the container is that we will never find happiness, or even satisfaction, by caring for it. It is strictly a mechanism for surviving, but not thriving. I'm all for the pleasures of the physical world, but they don't take us where we (or, at least I) want to go. How can they? These giant fuel and waste containers we call bodies, are simply the vehicles provided for carrying around all the shit we acquire in the course of a lifetime. So we fill them up with traumas and tragedies, fears and expectations, hopes and dreams, and carry, and deal with all that baggage as if it still existed. It does not. It is all in the past, and the past is gone, just a moment ago. All it gets us is war, the rape of our planet, divorce, sadness and rage- a whole world of unhappy. You can put makeup on a trashcan, but it's still a trashcan.

What we are given, in the original uncondition, is the 'river', that turbulent and chaotic stream of mostly disconnected moments, minuscule specks of space time that we are aware of, but do not embrace. Our lives flow in this slipstream, sometimes connecting, sometimes cascading, sometimes evaporating, but the stream is dynamic, and no matter how much we want to, we can't hold it, or stop it, or own it. It just keeps changing, elusive as pure black.

So, that's all we get you ask? The chaotic slipstream of happenstance and potentials, everchanging and unpredictable with no promise of permanent or forever. Yup, that's it! That's what the universe offers us once we emerge, but we are gifted with one other thing in the original uncondition, the blank slate of the clean spirit, where love shines its own light, unfiltered and pure. Every rule, every expectation, every condition, every fear entangles and dims that light. Unless you explode that container, empty it, you will never live as you're supposed to, never find happiness or satisfaction. It is only when the box is empty, when the spirit re-emerges clean, when love is unconditional, that we are fully able to embrace each fleeting moment of our lives, to live.

Is it possible? I don't know. But I do know it's the only dream worth having, the only thing worth striving for. I have been gifted, in my recent life, with glimpses of all my moments, flashes of light, many which strung together in a shared flow, and bore me, for a time, on my original river. Eventually, the container refilled, closed the sluice, and my spirit drowned, lost consciousness, but did not die. I don't know how yet to reconcile the spirit with the life, but I am going to find my answers, and live. I want every moment, embraced by my spirit, open in light. After all, 'I' might not be here in the next.................