"Searching for the Silences of My Soul"- a short story

Outside in the park, I could echo any sound I heard. After I heard a bird call, my mind could replicate the sound perfectly, as if the vibration left a ripple in my head that I could recall. But could I echo the silences of my soul?
I could describe to you and articulate most things I could see in the park to try to give you a sense of the beauty. Instead of saying “it was spring and it was noon and there were a bunch of trees,” I could say, “I felt nature animated and cartoonishly colorful. The harsh midday light exaggerated all the light colors of green leaves, purple wildflowers and endless light blue sky; and the perpetual melodic chirping of the various birds meant it was springtime in the park again.
As I entered the forest, it was like entering a kingdom of ancient beauty that had opened its heavenly gates unto me. No other humans were in sight, and yet I didn't feel alone; it was all so alive. The forest was like one living, breathing organism; a nurturing mother, and I was going to nest in her for a short time. As I happened upon an open valley along the hillside, walking at a slow, steady pace, I didn't even feel like I existed; I just felt like a floating eyeball spirit visiting a cherished memory. And yet when all birds and flies and squirrels acknowledged my existence, I accepted them as my brothers and sisters.”
I could even articulate the pain in my leg I gathered from running too hard on my midday jog in the park. How it felt like barbed wire had been thrown into a fire, left to char as embers encompassed its sharp nubs, and then was removed from the pit of flames and cast into my nervous system while still glowing hot. But it felt like someone had even taken the time to tie this barbed wire around my veins and muscles and tie it in knots. Then, every time I put pressure on my right foot, it felt like someone was tugging on the barbed wire, squeezing my veins and nerves and muscles into my bones, so they all pressed together tightly, at chronic intervals. At last I sat down to meditate.
I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, counting to make sure they were even. I was tuning out my thoughts with numbers. Then the front of my brain got fuzzy, and I could feel it warming up. I started to fly. I can describe this to you, but could I ever begin to describe the migration to God that comes from such inner peace? Could I begin to describe to you, or paint you a picture of how it felt to sit and meditate and feel the glowing depths of my soul?

About year ago, when I didn't know what to believe about God, I had an experience as I sang “We Shall Overcome” while holding hands with a circle of my peers and an old black woman. She had struggled through oppression in the South, enduring hardships nobody ought to endure. She was dead, no doubt, but the actress who played her had channeled her spirit so precisely, I had forgotten she was an actress while it was still early on in the production.
She looked like a seventy-five year old woman, with her hunched back and cane and the slow shuffle of her feet. She had the braided hair done in a style that had long gone out of fashion; the kind that only could have been popular in the nineteen forties, fifties or sixties; braided, jet black hair, appearing tough as rope and in the shape of a bun. There was a look of stern confidence embellished her face but could not hide the age marks of painful experience. She had the old, wrinkled face, and the eyes of a woman of experience. Those deep and wide unflinching eyes that seamlessly extended to the size of a dinner plate when she got excited. Her dark brown skin was the color and texture of a chocolate covered raisin; I could see her pruny hands and wrist sticking out of an old pink blouse with white spots and ruffles on the shoulders. The blouse was cut off at the top of the knees; and thick calves separated the blouse from white, high socks. The actress told the story of Fannie Lou’s life from the first-person perspective. By the end of the first fifteen minutes of the performance, my consciousness of this being an act slipped away and I drifted off into a lucid sleep as Ms. Hamer weaved a dream for me out of nothing but her memories, her commanding voice seeming to draw its power from images of grave injustices that had been indiscriminately been floating in the room that only she could see. She turned her pain into strength, pride and glory.

And so I let the ghost of Fannie Lou Hamer arise from the dead to tell me her secrets through both spoken word and song. I clapped along when she clapped, and sang along when she sang, and laughed when she laughed and cried when she cried.
I’ll never forget- she struggled to speak as she recounted the story of her own near-fatal beating. Her bus full of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members were going across the South to get black people registered to vote, but in one town, the police pulled her bus over and imprisoned everybody on board. The cops brought two young men, fellow SNCC members, into to her cell. Fannie Lou was made to lay face down as the young men were given nightsticks and forced to beat her. They beat her until she was a bloody pulp, even cracked her in the back of the head. They cried out as they carried on:
“Oh God, please forgive me!”
Fannie Lou was hysterical as she told us how she prayed she would die then and there; she told us this as she shook her fist in the air and looked through the ceiling and into the sky.
“But God had bigger plans for me”, she said.
I felt sick to my stomach. Tears burned my eyes as they came out, and I kept my lips tightly pursed because they began to wildly quiver. I was so angry and heartbroken and I couldn't speak because I knew anything I could say would be irrelevant in comparison. Tears washed down my face- there was no trying to empathize with the hopelessness of her situation; she effortlessly produced an empathy mist in the room that lingered over the hearts and minds to everyone who had just heard her words as she spoke. And yet she still preached hope, among faith and trust in God.
Why? Where does that mind of yours disappear to- what fantasy world is there waiting for you when the world strikes you a blow that leaves you for dead?
By the end of the show, she had come down from the low-rise stage to the small audience and requested everyone join hands in a circle, so we did; we were a melting pot of all types of races and sexual orientations, singing “We Shall Overcome”. I remember forgetting any doubts I had about God at that point. God had finally come to me because I was finally ready. As I clasped my neighbors hands, I didn't realize it but I was swinging my arms back and forth as I sang. I asked myself, “Isn't this perfect? This performance and unity could not have been executed any better.” That’s just a thought coming from a feeling, a feeling that I could only describe as my heart beating as one with everyone in the room, and beating in synch with the rhythm of God.
It was a feeling of being face to face with something larger than me- like how the birds must feel seeing me, this 6-foot bewildered looking, heavy-breathing creature walk into the park where nobody else is around, and I stare into their eyes. Except I don’t see anything bigger than me- just like-minded human beings; but I perceived something; I felt, with what must be by third eye, that these humans are being concrete love and purity, respect and unity; and I’m overwhelmed by a feeling of childlike innocence. I mean, here I am, a twenty year old man who’s impulsively and widely swinging his arms back and forth before he even thinks to feel embarrassed by it. I feel like I’m a two year old meeting Barney the Dinosaur, except Barney has this ancient wisdom of what it truly means to be alive, to have a pure emotion, or faith, hope and trust in an unseen, unconditionally loving creator. This is concentrated guidance; this is Yoda and Master Splinter and Gandalf the White and Rafiki and the collective good intentions and actions of mankind multiplied by infinite but condensed into a drop of chemical liquid that was now tickling my brain and sending chills throughout my nervous system. Everything inside of me was laughing loudly, but the look on my face was one of reverence. It was reverence to wisdom ancient like the trees of the forest; the wisdom and guidance provided by studying the celestial skies; the knowledge encoded underneath the soil; and the answers that come when a light bulb goes off in someone’s head when they completed the puzzle to use objects in nature as tools, from canoes and paper to medicine and computers. It was nature’s apparent ability to create order out of chaos, to reproduce itself, to grow and learn from itself and adapt and evolve; and most importantly, to heal itself. The lizard’s grows back when plucked. And Fannie Lou Hamer taught me faith, hope, and trust in God ain't nothin’ but a lizard’s tale, but you got to grow your own tail when life plucks it off.
All of this knowledge in one feeling caused by one drop of a chemical in my brain- I was witnessing life with my third eye for the first sober time of my life. And yet isn’t this feeling ineffable?
Nay, if you ever were a child full of awe and wonder, you can understand; the bird calls and the green grass before you is the demonstration of my “soul”; anything pure and natural, such as the unconditional love of a strong family; the truth of a child’s or a faithful and wounded woman’s speech; and the beauty of nature in all its symmetry. The universe is us living out our “souls”; it is the formal substance of its divine origin. The order of the universe- the homeostasis, the equilibrium, the balance, the peaceful resting state that we all tend to as we arise out of the necessary chaos of the primordial soup- that order that we perceive as fundamental for the birth and growth and existence of anything, is the reflection of the order of our “souls”. It’s also why what’s done in the dark will be brought to the light, because the truth has an energy to it, to be known. The good order is always there, in the back of our mind, waiting for our body and mind to use evolution to catch up to it.
All this I remembered as I basked in the light of the park. But it was easy too find peace- It wasn’t challenging me at all; I felt like I wasn’t growing in the sunlight. I decided to shape shift into bamboo so I could be skinny enough to thrive in the darkest regions of my consciousness.
But could the narrator in my head describe what was seen as I entered the wilderness’ underbrush called my unconscious mind? In the thick, shadowy jungles; the unexplored territory lay just as pure as anything else. Yet I rarely have shown much light on it, except in my dreams or when my imagination ran away with me. Sometimes both attractive and repulsive thoughts of S&M and the ingesting of drugs and alcohol took me there, and turned me into both gods and beasts for the time being. I often carried those desires into out-of-control extremes, so I am taking a sabbatical from drugs and mental pornography, hoping to find myself as able to exist without them. Maybe someday I shall return to their suffocating arms of irrational paranoia and temporarily satisfying and yet overall unsatisfying flavors, but that’s another story.

As I sat in the wilderness to meditate today, I felt someone walk up behind me and tap me on the shoulder. “Are you on drugs?” the apparition asked, with a concerned look upon her phantom face.
“I am drugs!” I replied cynically, in my haste. What I meant to say was this:
“I am the child of a passionate night of intercourse between the minds of Salvador Dali and Lewis Carroll.
The earth is a child of the universe, and I am a child of the earth, making me a son of a son of a big bang. The offspring of the birth pangs of a red shift. I am made up of tiny universes as well.
I am also the son of God just as much as I am the son of man. I am Jesus and Krishna, but what makes me dangerous is my ability to deviate from this enlightenment. One minute I could be inspired by the Holy Spirit and speak Pure Truth; another minute I could be confused and leading you astray. Everything I say and do can either bring you to the Devil or God. I should just become a religious man, so people aren't confused as to what side I’m on, but you can never tell nowadays.
But let’s not talk in such extremes. Everything I do is either in accordance to my virtues or my vices, yes. But the thing is, my mind lives on the beach, where my virtues and vices blend into each other. It’s the fact nothing is good or bad in itself that confuses a lot of people. Take war, for example; join the front lines of an infantry unit and see how handy your vices come in then. Everything society abhors, such as laughing about death, becomes necessary to cope with the everyday reality of death and evil.
They’d like to be superstitious, those tribal moralists, but breaking a mirror is only bad luck in the context of having a bad day; or in leading up to a self-fulfilling prophecy. In another context, a broken mirror might end a narcissistic trance. You see, a virtue can easily become a vice, and vice versa, given the right conditions. That’s why you’ll see me throwing my vices into the sea of virtues, just hoping someone will see that even my faults are the products of my good intentions. This shoreline of ambiguity is where I do my best thinking.
The most religious thing I can do, rather than be a hedonist or a monk, is to live my life the middle way. To strive for that balance between peace and adrenaline, between love and fear of the things I am fully aware of and the things I forget in my unconscious ignorance.
Because you’ll be surprised of what you miss when you're not looking for it- and my awareness is always blind to something. There’s always something to miss. And there are things only my ignorance remembers and my awareness forgets. That’s why I’m here, in the shade of this thicket of bamboo, deep in the heart of the wilderness.”

She looked at my outstretched leg, which was tense and burning from jogging too hard and she called forth the wind to massage it.
“You mustn't force your body,” she told me. “You must listen to what it is telling you. Sometimes it seems like you are slowed down, but your body is just healing itself. The same goes for your mind and spirit. You are too impatient to regain your autonomy, so you say ‘I AM in control’ and push too hard. But there was a part of your body that was meant to be slowed down, so it could rest. Don’t push it, child, don’t push it.
“Frankly, your body you was not meant to be in complete control over- such as pushing through pain, when that pain is warning you not to push. That’s right, you can be in control over your tongue and your penis and your brain, but before you came here, on this big beautiful earth, you carved out some lines that you just couldn't cross without damaging ya. For the gift of pain is as precious a gift from other side as the gift of freedom. Free will and freedom to create your own reality- that’s beautiful, and you own it. But you mustn't, in your haste to be yourself, lose control by trying to grain control- such as taxing your body’s limits and then riding roughshod over the healing process. You can’t skip the quiet moments; sometimes you just got to stand still or even go backwards a little bit. It’s part of the master plan; the limits you make here on earth and the limits you made before you got here. Pain, baby, and stress; you have to use it the right way. You got to use just the right amount of freedom in certain areas, and control in the others.”
Her words echoed in my head. Was she a ripple in time? She sounded a lot like me. I had considered these ideas before, but never had they so articulately been brought into existence using speech. Was she telepathic? I decided I might as well ask her the big question, then.
“Why am I here?”
“To be a painter, an author, a director, a composer- who comes to live inside his own beautiful painting, story, film, or musical for a while. To live through the manifestation of your own seed of thought that reflects the divine inside of you. To be doing three things at once: to mind a garden of thought; to grow with the flowers in that garden; and to never forget the source of your seeds. Don’t you see now where your soul is now?”
My eternal soul, I whispered in a hushed and astonished voice. I am the planter and the planted. I am the universe, the earth, and the body. And I am the seeds that I spread; right now, I remember that I am God.
And that remembering brings my soul forth, in its purest essence, and I can see all that I can’t see with my naked eye; feel all that I can’t feel with my naked body; and perceive all I cannot perceive with my naked mind. I was actually demonstrating this fact- putting an experience to knowledge- engaging in spiritual praxis.
Could I liberate the universe, the earth, and my body by using only the dialogues between my mind and soul? I’ve seen beautiful artists liberate tree branches by turning them into instruments of paint brushing. Why couldn't I do the same with words? Why couldn't I paint the picture-perfect masterpiece behind the back of my eyelids using language?
That’s why I’m here in the wilderness, breathing in the fresh air, listening to the stream and bird calls. Not speaking; just listening for an echo, so I can find The Voice. Not looking; just searching for a memory, so I can have A Vision. And my intention is to be an artist of vocabulary; a vocabularist; and convey The Message as simply as possible. It gets easier with practice, thank God.