We are those that tremble, we shiver, we shake in the face of all that comes when we go. The storytellers of the stars, we, those that find pictures in the sky when we draw lines between the glow, inventors of myth for the towering figures on the canvas black, tell ourselves we’re protected, held in the great hand of a god bigger than it all. One day those fingers will curl, we know this from our first breath, feel it in the back of our minds like an itch unscratchable and run from it on instinct, and we will be dust again in the palm of something bigger. We stand here quiet, crane these necks until bruised, and guess at what will be when we will not. We guess, we’re all just guessing.
It’s hopeful though, this casting out of the nets inside us, it’s always been a hopeful thing. We throw our fear wide and imagine it hooking tight all the beautiful wishes we’ve cast, all the prayers to all the different gods we trust in to bring us salvation, serenity when all is spent, when we are slowed to a stop. Snagging them and returning them to us, wrapping us in them, warm and swaddled like the first moments we saw light. We believe so deeply that peace will come, some great heaven where all we lost will be found once more, and we fight for what we believe. What then, when we fight others who do not see what we see when we point our eyes at the starlight? What then when we are stubborn as stones and defend our best guess against theirs?
What then if we are wrong? Or more, what then if we are all right? All this wasted time, these hours of discontent, these murderous years stretching back before crucifixion began a movement, before Buddha sat beneath tree and found enlightenment, before Odin, before Shiva, before Atum or the great turtle that carried the world upon its back, what of all the blood soaked soil from those whose prayers did not sound the same?
We’re all just guessing, hopeful guessing aimed at the beyond that comes for us all, slow steps until it taps our shoulders and asks us to turn, to close our eyes, to go where we must go when we must go. We do not know, and we shake in this ignorance, we tell ourselves it will all be ok, in seven thousand languages plus one hundred more, we whisper to the scared in us, that we’ve nothing to fear, though we hear the countdown clock faintly in the corners of our ears. What then if we are wrong, what then if we are all right, all along?
All these hateful wars, all this raging on the single ship we all share, I think often of what we’ve lost. So much spent, so much invested on the After This, that we plant divide on the Here Now, and I ask myself why. I do not understand the hate we hold, we humans, we storytellers all needing solace in the long night.
I will use my time, what is left of what’s to come, wisely, and so I tell you this. I will waste not hours on the guesses, on the hope we aim at the beyond, but on the understanding that we all say the same things, we all tell the same stories, they just don’t look the same. If we all spoke truth of the hypotheses we create, the imaginations we call doctrine, wouldn’t we see? We don’t know, and this it what it is to be alive, to be this species, on this planet, at this moment on a cosmic timeline stretching infinitely in all directions. We don’t know, and so we guess, and as long as the beliefs we hold don’t hurt anyone else, why do we bother with the assimilation of these ideas? There is room for hope in every color, every flavor, and it matters not the words we decorate it with.
The fights we should fight belong not to the gods we speak to in the lonely minutes before slumber comes, in the final breaths before we breathe no more, the blood should not spill for what we call the great hand that holds us, what we name the beyond, should there be one, no. The battles worthy of joining are those of hatred, of judgement, of prejudice that reduces the value of another, that strips rights, strips love, and plants more seeds of more fear in the garden of their hearts. This is why we should fight, not for what we believe when all we believe is good, but for us all to have the freedom to do the believing, to love the way they love, to become they who they were meant to become.
All we do is guess, fill a lifetime with postulation and feel our fingers strain and grow arthritic with years of crossing. We are those of hope, of cave’s emergence, of fire starting, of stone wall painting, we are those of dot to dot in the inky pool of the night, we are those that tremble before all we cannot understand in the infinitesimalness of our minds.
Keep your hope, but bury your hatred, for there is no room where we’re all going. This is all we can do, all we have ever been able to do.
Let your shaking calm.
We’re all just guessing,
aiming hope at the beyond,
to calm our shaking.
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