In the shock of sudden change, you gasp for air.

Breathe.

In this single breath, you inhale every thought, every mindful creation and every touch.

With that you take in the slight glance from passers-by, the warmth of loved ones and the unannounced and unexplained glow that you inflamed with the somebodies of the streets, those in waiting rooms and lifts, on delayed trains and on fairground rides. Some are one time encounters, some are regular, albeit you take each stranger inside yourself.

You expand with imagination, with logic, with social structure and equally structured rebellion against this structure. You evaporate into every identity you have created for yourself. Accelerated higher and made wiser by the self-identities you never managed to Be.

All thousands of them.

You rise with fear, with doubt, confusion and honesty. Everything that had immersed you, manifested inside of you, was absorbed by you and had enlightened you. It accelerates you higher and higher away from the world, the flat land, the global earth and all its natures that your science and geography teachers only told you existed.

In this final breath, you realise the absolute importance of the basic human function. You’ve been in military training for this all your life—breathing. And now, whenever you feel it necessary, you release your breath, slowly and steadily, as you hover above a largely blank sphere of water and vibrations.

The first thing that escapes you are the thoughts you refused, the images you rejected. Some are unkind, some simply unwanted. Some, that you visualised as deeply thickened clouds and you gave to them the wrong directions. You blew them away when you entered a meditative state on an island, that sacred place, the one your parents never got to see. Some clouds are laced in evil, others are gifts you didn’t get around to giving. A lot of these are ritual, but for the most part there are seductive sounds or sedating sights that cannot be comprehended in your human life.

They fall onto the waters of the earth beneath you. They glisten and dance. They magnetise towards each other and repel away from each other. They don’t have a specific location, a home. You breathe out a little more and you find yourself dancing on them, weightlessly. Frolicking on the floating flowers that have blossomed and wept outside of your mind.

More air comes out of you. The particles become faces of those that have mattered. They form a deliberate and unordered line around the sphere that energises your flight with what can only be described as form of balance. You appreciate that tremendously.

As more breath seeps out, mountains of lust and love fly gently away from you and begin bright and eccentric caves. Most resemble a skillfully designed pattern and fluster upwards in groups with streams of lightness and darkness slipping and skating in-between them. Other faces that mattered sprout into trees that could have been drawn by a four year old let loose on a pack of wax crayons. These faces are stand alone squiggles that quiver on the waterbed, much more beautiful than the mountains and caves, you think.

As you continue to exhale, a whole world is created from within that is no longer contained within the object of your human body. This is where you shall live now. This is your home.

You are the world around you. Welcome to the arcane. Welcome to the afterlife.

 

Relephant:

While I’m Alive, I Want to Talk About Death.

~

Author: Annabelle Buck

Editor: Travis May

Photos: Wikimedia