Wednesday, November 26, 2008

Squirrel Talk, or the way to everything

Having freely admitted to the pirate recently, that talking to squirrels has become a permanent part of my life, I sashayed out to the porch this morning to find White Ears. Having recently immersed in a new community, with wisdom and rules galore, I found that I had reached a place requiring answers, and I knew that she could offer me clues.

"Where is the edge?" I queried.

"The edge of what?", she wondered, while cracking an acorn and stuffing it into her cheek. Then, she blindsided her sister Lucy, and they danced in the trees for a while.

"Why my edge of course" I answered when she returned to me.

"Well, my 'dangerous thing' friend, I most genuinely pray that you do not have one".

I was dumbstruck by her wisdom. I mean, I'm not silly enough to think that we don't have boundaries, but I think for the most part, they are self-imposed. We most definitively feel safer within the confines of our self-constructed containers, but isn't it odd that all of us eventually discover, that we forgot to put something in, that we neglected to leave the door open.

"There is joy in the dance, but it does not exist for the sake of the joy......It does not exist for us, but we for it"--CS Lewis

It is not enough to push our edges, to open our doors. It is necessary to explode them.

We enter this world with nothing, and it should be our lifelong goal to stay that way. If only we could remember the joy of our first good shit. That is what life is all about. Shitting out all the waste, shitting out your edges, shitting out everything until there is nothing.

There are no instructions for this life, no manual. We emerge into this world like an unpainted canvas. We have the options, even now, to let life paint it for us, or paint it ourselves, paint it with colors waiting to emerge, never seen, never realized. Even the canvas is unrealized. Let the canvas be your boundless life, saturated in nothing, awaiting the color of everything. It was noted, when Orbiting the Giant Hairball, that by the time sixth grade rolls around, there are virtually no children willing to identify themselves as artists. We only limit our creations when we choose to let them evolve confined. My pirate says that her art emerges through her, not from her. This is unconfined creation. Is it any wonder that such a huge percentage of our greatest writers were drunks? They chose to puke themselves empty. I like the shit thing better.

Squirrels dance everyday. That is why they are here.

".....You got to dance like nobody's watching...."

I used to think those were very wise words. Now, I don't know. It seems to me that we should dance without watching ourselves, lose the self-examination, lose the image, lose the fear, lose the expectation. If you smash the bottle, they will all disappear, evaporate like gasoline on the tarmac, like the old colors of the rainbow, like squirrel piss on a sunny day.