Prayers from the Hinterland

...reaching toward…striving toward

...crawling-on-our-bellies-with-nails-dug-into-the-ground toward

We chase after the meaning of all of this like we chase after eternal life; the fruit from the tree that gives us knowledge, some divine secret that holds it all together, holds us together in our un-hinged-ness, but we are chasing after butterflies. The wings of these things are far too fragile, as if they were creatures made for another place, another far more tender world. We steal the breath out of the lungs of the thing we love, we cling to life and we lose it. The very act of love becomes a strangle hold. Like caging birds of paradise for the beauty of their colours, but their pearlescent plumage loses all its essence, its soul destroyed by captivity.

We touch the butterfly’s wings and it can never fly again.

…and the truth shall set you free…the truth shall set you free...

Why do we cling so tightly? It is that deepest of human insecurities, that fears the loss of love, the loss of the good, deeply superstitious that life is set against us. It is as if we were knit together with a longing for a love that could not be satisfied in this harsh world, a love without fear, a love that does not ask us to edit ourselves into the fragile artificiality of deserving. Starving for a love that could hold us in the darkest night of the soul and ask for nothing in return, and that would keep on forgiving every insecure cruelty, time after time again. We are a starving people, we have a hunger that cannot be sated, and so when we see the flicker of its wings we chase it to its demise.

…here is the answer to the riddle…you must lose life in order to find it.

For most of us, to ask for anything more than a puncturing of the numbness, for all too short a moment, is to ask far too much. For us, to ask for life in all its fullness is a luxury beyond the knit of our lives. We make do with pick pocketing pennies from the pockets of life; crumbs off the table. We steal, for life does not surrender itself easily for us to sate ourselves.

These stolen morsels; they are not what we need. We need water, but we drink wine. We need love, but instead we fuck. We need to follow our desires, but instead we lose ourselves in wanting. These are the diuretics of the soul. We appease ourselves with pitifully poor substitutes; little titillations that make us feel, something like ‘alive’, for a brief fragile tragic moment. Hooked and empty, hooked and empty.

…all we like children have uttered vows…“I will never let this happen to me again”…

We long to re-enact a drama where we have power, where we have an ounce of control over our own destinies. We would do anything, pay for any delusion, and exchange anything for the fantasy of control. Just a little morsel of control over my own feelings, or the feelings of another. We let go of any desire to have real power over our worlds, but we appease ourselves with these little unrealities, these twisted little delusions.

…suffer the little children, for they have suffered enough…

What is exchanged in these interactions is rarely what is literally exchanged. The currency changing hands is a sleight of hand that hides the more esoteric exchange. Monies become metaphors. With this currency we buy our delusions, secreted within the masquerade; we step on stage, we sell ourselves to have a taste of this control. This is the poison, this is the addiction.

Hooked on reliving the past, finding safety in the repetition; a paradoxical safety. Safety in the most dangerous of worlds; reliving and re-enacting the shortest of tragedies. Tragic stories; painful histories scraped into the walls of our heart. The prisoner within engraves a story on the walls, desperately hoping the words bleed through into the world of the appearances and apparitions. Bleeding like prayers.

Will the truth set you free, will the truth set us free, will the truth set me free? We are waiting for the miracle. The miracle of the one whose very touch resonates at the core; an intimacy that melts our defences, reminds us that we are loveable for no other reason than because we are.

We are longing, we are hungry; longing for the prophet to come. The prophet who sees through the walls of our identity, beyond what we allow the world to see. The one who sees the truth of the hidden self, behind who I say that I am. The hidden self with the secret name. A secret name hidden in a secret place that no one will utter. These are the names on the white stones, the names that do not bind us, or reduce us. These names speak of everything that we are, all the things we were but were afraid to live: a name like thunder that decimates the defences we try to hold up with feigned strength.