45s on 33 – #67: “Nobody’s Fault But Mine”

Got lost for a little while, nobody’s fault but my own. Sometimes all the daily battles become overwhelming, but you walk through the woods while it’s raining and notice the ghost pipe congresses blossoming, and you realize all those daily battles out there navigating the immense gridlock, both infrastructural as well as psychic, just isn’t all that important. Even the Other Realm gridlock of time tunnels and future versions of me trying to enslave all other versions of me seemed trifling and unnecessary. I can’t control it all, can’t even control tiny portions of it, and in fact try to remain grounded in the fact that it’s all energies and chemistries and the most I can hope for is to be at peace with all this shit, just tune my energies to flow smoothly with all else.

The complication becomes the infrastructure that civilization has put in place, meaning the physical gridlock. We, as humans, don’t really respect the larger biosphere’s equality too well, and still have a pretty strong sense of god-ordained or even god-like dominion over all else. As I was on the forest floor, contemplating the ghost pipe, this was really driven home to me.

Ghost pipe looks fungus like but is in actuality a chlorophyll-free plant, which grows in long straight stalk, white as white, with single flower on top that shows signs of pink. They grow in clusters – and I always think of them as little beacon congresses of hope. They are scientifically considered parasitic, because they feed off the mycorrhizal woodland sub-strata, and they’ve never been grown in captivity because there’s too complicated a relationship between trees and fungus and sun to replicate them.

Are they real though? Of course they are, even if they look ghostly and a strong example of Other Realm-looking shit in our real life. But scientific thinking suggests that real can be replicated in the lab, that those conditions can be recreated by man. Ghost pipe can’t be grown in cultivation though, never has and likely never will. Thus, according to scientific egotism, it doesn’t truly exist.

It seems to me easy to extend this to much of the other Other Realm things that have happened to me, that though science can’t explain the shit through re-creation, it doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t exist. But mankind, when armed with militant mind, regardless of the hollow point philosophy behind that militancy, is so quick to judge and demean and demoralize. It leaves me feeling drained, and not really wanting to fuck with it, not caring about Heart Stars or making words have rhythm or finding images that capture magic or bother with any fucking art at all. It makes me disappear into the woods, sheltered from judgmentalities and the gridlock.

Of course, even in the woods we’ve built our footpaths, and we have our maps from previous travelers and the gridlock still sneaks its nefarious little philosophical tentacles into our actions. But yesterday I was walking along through the woods, hit a crossroads of two planned paths, and a turtle was there, in a direction I wouldn’t have gone. So I figured he was pointing me that way, so I went, and then that path ended, and I should’ve kept going, into the wilderness, but I was afraid to leave the gridlock completely, wasn’t ready for that just yet, might not ever be, because heart can’t completely commandeer this spaceship body from monkey-minded egotism, so I went back. It hadn’t been but ten minutes tops, but the turtle was gone, nowhere to be found in any direction.

I walked the path back out the woods and went home, eventually, but sat at the ghost pipe for a long time. I didn’t write shit, and tried to think as little as possible, at least with my brain. I breathed in all the world’s suffering and exhaled relief. It helped, but as soon as I hit the asphalt with truck tires, the judgment started beaming in from a myriad of manufactured sources again. It felt like a losing battle when I thought about it too much.