As the new year approaches, Palabra has been wrestling with time, which is to say wrestling with illusion. We know the past only by the things that represent it— by pictures, or stories, or recordings, or by our memories. We know the future only by the hopes and fears of what may become our present. In either case, past or future, what we experience is merely the production of our minds. The representations of the past show us “facts” through the lens of our personality; the hopes and fears of the future show us more about ourselves than about what is. If we think that we live “in time” we are living in a dream because the past and the future trap us in a reflection of ourselves; and if the past and the future are merely dreams then how can time exist? Furthermore, how do we escape the illusion of time, the house of mirrors that we live in when we think time is real? …Only by losing ourselves to the present. When life is at its best, there is no time because we are so swept up into the moment that there is no past, no future, no self. But when there is no time and no self, who or what is acting in these, our best moments? What is playing music, what is painting, what is saying words that are unplanned but resonant in truth? When we are not “self” but only present, what have we become? In The Odyssey, when Menelaus is wrestling with Proteus, he discovers that the “Ancient of the Sea” is a shape-shifter. As Menelaus tries to hang on, his opponent turns into a lion, a snake, a tree, a boar, then water… until eventually the contest is over. When it ends, Proteus gives up and tells Menelaus the truth. When we wrestle with time we must contend with illusions until at last we are left only with the present—and within the present we find the truth we are seeking—the truth that we are. The present isn’t for you all, it is you all.

-Palabra.

On the morning of my eighteenth birthday I sang with the birds.  As the sun rose over my parent’s back yard I ran in circles with the perfect knowledge of why the birds were singing. It may be true that I had eaten a small piece of paper that completely changed what I heard, what I saw, what I smelled…but I don’t think I was living a delusion (and Aldous Huxley, who is deeper than anyone I know, doesn’t think so either). I sang at the top of my lungs knowing what the birds knew: that the morning was a miracle, that the dawn was god, that the air around me was a plenum vibrating with life and knowledge. Since then I have learned that the whole world sings. The music of birds follows inherent and predictable patterns; the songs of whales reach across the depths of the seas; the oscillations of the earth on its axis can be rendered into music and it’s beautiful! Our very speech is music and I believe that one day a genius will run a staff across the heavens and demonstrate that the stars are the notes to a symphony. Poor Prufrock cried, “I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each./ I do not think that they will sing to me.” But that doesn’t have to be your fate. You choose my friends. Either the world is a silent cacophony, or there is song ringing through the soles of your feet, melody in the eyes of those you love, and harmony in the rhythm of your days. The music of the universe is for you all.

-Palabra.