The Shadow of a Man's Dream

The clouds are high, white, and fluffy against a light blue sky. They are dispersed in chunks, a daub of white here, a little fluff there, leading back to the clear, steely, purple mountains in the distance, the tallest of them capped by more white snow. All this repetition of white, the height of the clouds, the sun so bright it cooks the color out of shirts and into skin, it's all background, a stage, a setting for a great normalcy and greater mystery.

He wonders whether it has meaning or not, whether it matters if he notices the clouds or the mountains or the sun. He wonders idly whether the world of his senses matters more or less than the world of his mind, each connection sending arcs of chemical and electric signals racing across new neurons and new pathways.

He's at the brink of a new mental maturity, somewhere nearing the edge of a great abyss or at the lip of a great peak he's been hiking. He's unsure whether he has been crawling or climbing; his internal gravity cannot tell him whether he is edging near a vast emptiness, or the final stretch to a grand plain of new knowing. He is either in the canyon or nearing it, though the difference may not matter. He reaches his arms out, strained and battered, but lovingly so. His fingers are sore, pounding with blood as he crams them into a new crack split open by understanding.

Human beings are complex and complicated, both biologically and socially formed, unique to the planet, but part of a constantly changing whole. The universe echoes into them, forming them in its own complex and complicated image, echoes into all things, everywhere, itself a shadow dreamt by some sleeping god or universe machine. The whole neither fits together, nor falls apart in this intricate, elegant, and eternal shifting, but instead defies the philosophers and their inductive reasoning, the scientists in their observations, the poet's musings, and the young lovers and their fate.

He knows this like he knows his ABC's, absently, recalling but only now beginning to reflect upon it. He is riding the wave of the greatest systematizing, the greatest crystallization of thought he has ever experienced, placing pieces into their rightful positions, and watching as the cogs, apple seeds, and nuclei whip, zing, and soar in modes yet unimagined. His consciousness is moving from beyond himself, beyond his world, beyond his universe, puzzling and smiling at the wholeness of existence, the second simplicity of the All.

The clouds are made of hydrogen and oxygen nothings, floating upon still emptier air, and yet they provide foundations to the heavens.

What glory! What commonplace! What else could we expect? A paradox of brilliance and dullness, a union of the divine with nothingness.