Small pink toes near my legs. How many toes are touching someone else’s legs in the world? And what of the countless other worlds with the countless other toes? Have they their pinks? Have they their wonders? Or is their world pink, filled with blossoming truths that ripen on every extremity growing out their bodies, tree-like beings with toes growing out branches? I sit and wonder about toes because this is how the world becomes lovely: by wondering about things. We wonder about something and transform it through the alchemy of wonder: transform it into an object that dances in our heart long after it started dancing in our eyes.
The toes are attached to feet. I rub them and the nerves tell the brain this is something like pleasure. The experience machine then produces the pleasure experience. The brain tells the voice to emit a sound and a soft moan shakes the air and travels, getting quieter and quieter, to my ears, where the vibrations become electrical impulses that go to my own experience machine and become a sound. This sound tells me I did a good job squeezing the feet, and so someone else’s feet, a someone whose identity I know nothing beyond their someoneness, will likely get their feet rubbed one day. The past and the future are tied into this moment the way a tied bow shows evidence of its once having been straight and its assured future returns to that straightness. So much of what we notice is the valley time willingly carves out between the primordial before and the eternal after.
The feet are not shaped like the analogous hands above them. We take great pride in how we are different from our simian cousins: likely so that we do not take pride in our similarities. These feet do not have the dexterity of their simian counterparts, but that is more than made up for by the hands. Instead, these feet imply we walk upright. This leads to issues of posture, constipation, inability to climb and a unique physiology that facilitates our focusing on differences and not similarities. But it frees the hands from the ground that freed the tools from the ground that freed the arrows from the stone that freed the meat from the bison that freed the agriculture from the forest that freed the civilization from nature that freed the human from god that freed everything and everyone far from everything and everyone. Now I would like to walk with my unique feet back aways, I would like to trade some of this sublime freedom for sublime belonging. I will trade in my computer and my efficiency for a god that is in the world and a world that is in god.
The toes are attached to feet. I rub them and the nerves tell the brain this is something like pleasure. The experience machine then produces the pleasure experience. The brain tells the voice to emit a sound and a soft moan shakes the air and travels, getting quieter and quieter, to my ears, where the vibrations become electrical impulses that go to my own experience machine and become a sound. This sound tells me I did a good job squeezing the feet, and so someone else’s feet, a someone whose identity I know nothing beyond their someoneness, will likely get their feet rubbed one day. The past and the future are tied into this moment the way a tied bow shows evidence of its once having been straight and its assured future returns to that straightness. So much of what we notice is the valley time willingly carves out between the primordial before and the eternal after.
The feet are not shaped like the analogous hands above them. We take great pride in how we are different from our simian cousins: likely so that we do not take pride in our similarities. These feet do not have the dexterity of their simian counterparts, but that is more than made up for by the hands. Instead, these feet imply we walk upright. This leads to issues of posture, constipation, inability to climb and a unique physiology that facilitates our focusing on differences and not similarities. But it frees the hands from the ground that freed the tools from the ground that freed the arrows from the stone that freed the meat from the bison that freed the agriculture from the forest that freed the civilization from nature that freed the human from god that freed everything and everyone far from everything and everyone. Now I would like to walk with my unique feet back aways, I would like to trade some of this sublime freedom for sublime belonging. I will trade in my computer and my efficiency for a god that is in the world and a world that is in god.
