Just over here contemplating how expectations and norms are all constructs built by others to serve their own interests and living life instead as a blank canvas with inner voice as muse and guide will always be a truer and purer path to the infinite universal wisdom already inside of us and how the only way back to it is comprehensive unlearning and intentional silence but I’m aaalso contemplating whether I should make quesadillas or salmon with dijon tonight.

Lately, all the words have been stuck inside. Packed into my brain like sardines marinating in their own salty brine. No room for the air to get in and loosen them up. No words or description at all. Like grabbing a passing thought in your fist and examining it as it lays in your palm. You can see its colour and shape and feel its temperature against your skin, but you don’t know what it is yet. What it’s made of. Its material. And so the words don’t come to define it. They’re lodged inside. Its isness hasn’t revealed itself yet. You’re just looking at this thing, this thing that is something but is also nothing, holding it, sitting with it, watching the light sparkle on it, knowing that it’s worthy of holding even if the isness never becomes yours to define.

We were never in control. We never knew. We built a world fast and loud in all our supposed knowing. Mistaking our progress for power and control. Waiting for peace always just at the end of our ambitions. We didn’t know it was already here. Just paved over. The dirt-trodden path to our deepest wisdom was too slow beneath our hurried feet.

But then. An end. A beginning. We were exiled back into stillness, stripped of our defenses. The outside world got quiet, we quieted too. A silence we didn’t recognise. It was excruciating. We suffered. Resisted. The unknown. Loss. Anxiety and fear. Ever-ceasing power. We gripped it so tight in desperation that our clenched hands quivered and bled. We still couldn’t hold onto it. It slipped through our fingers and fell crashing back into the Earth. The sound it made was an alarm. We mistook it for an explosion.

In our forced surrender we started to notice. Things we hadn’t before thought or felt. What was dormant awakened. Our growth felt like pain and our surrender felt like defeat. But the wound was actually a cure. The assault an intervention.

The force that came to destroy us had saved us. The sound it made was an alarm.