I dream such vivid dreams.
I’ve seen lands that do not exist, spoken languages I do not understand. I have flown through clear skies, I have dove beneath endless oceans and held my breath for hours and hours at a time. I have lived magical lives as magical people, sometimes men, sometimes women, sometimes neither, sometimes animal, sometimes storm clouds that don’t know what to do with their rainfall.
I have died in dreams, more times than I can count, in more ways than I can remember, and these dreams have shaped what I know. I’ve been pierced by arrows while jumping onto trains speeding into the distance, I’ve been in helicopters crashing after flying through a war. I’ve faded away and watched myself rise from the body I traveled this life inside, watched it remain like unused vehicle, tired and worn through. I have known Death as friend, held her hand as we walked into the fog together. I have seen Death for her fog, for her thick white mist on some churning sea, seen this body as the ship that floats upon it.
Dying is this ship on this ocean in that fog, but there is something we forget, some small truth that comes before we begin again:
Our masts rise through the roof of the fog, we climb to the crows nest just before we go. We send out birds to search for land.
We are not the ships tossed in tumult and wave. We are not the sea, surging and soaked in salt and white gloom. We are not the crows nest, not the mast it sits upon. We are not the hands held to the glow above, not the fingertips that last knew wingbeats.
We are the birds sent for land.
Our souls are feathered things, winged and hollow boned. We are not told this, we are kept from this secret as those that know it become lipless things. They know what we will know, though they cannot share it.
We see dying as our ships sinking, the creaking of our beams, the breaking of our hulls. We fear the cold waters rising, the flooding of our galleys, our keels opening to the darkness below. We shudder at the promise of silent fall to fathomless depths, call it darkness what lies ahead and shake our heads violently to tear those thoughts asunder.
Death is not sinking, I tell you with a mouth that shapes only truth. Death is the sound of flapping wings against some soft sunrise. Death is the great flight into morning light in search of new land after so long at sea. We are the birds we send forth, last gesture like offering to the gods of what lies beyond, we are the songs we sing into the first blush of day, we are the solid earth we seek to begin again. New.
We are what is next, the seamless transition from this to that. We are the strength of our feathers to find it.
There is no end, not here. There is no finality to the fog on that ocean, to the soaring we were made for. We will fly away from these ships we knew, we will watch as they become refuge for some other life, as we settle onto sea floors and become home to all that swims or crawls, as we bounce songs back to the whales that sang them.
I know now, and my dreams have taught me, that life is the fog and death is not the sea, not the darkness, not the empty below us as we sail. Death is the light above it all, the velvet glow that calls to us as we rise and fall on the waves of our experience.
I know now, we are the birds and their singing, we are the wings that beat through the soup of the air, the thickness of life that obscures the shine above. We are the steady flight to find our place again.
What then do we fear? What causes us to tremble so, to shake like leaves in gale, to curl into ourselves and hide from the illumination that we will one day know? Why then do we waste our days, our precious moments in this skin, in this ship that sails, on such trivial things? Why then do we spend our minutes with anger, why then do we fill our silly hearts with hatred, with such recalcitrance to tenderness, to grace? Why then do we forget?
There is, across the dark waters, another shore that waits. There is land again, there are trees that grow and water that falls, there is sand soft as silk that will know our footprints, there are sunsets and lightning storms and snowfall and wind. There is laughter, there is joy, there is the ancient ache we’ve known since explosion built us from the stars above us.
There is another ship, another sea we will one day sail. There is another sinking, another rising, another settling on the floor of it. There is another set of hands lifting up into obscurity, seeking shine, there is another melody of flight we’re just waiting to make. We were not built to sit safely upon those decks.
We were built to fly.
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We are not the ships
we are the birds sent for land.
Death a foggy sea.
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