Reflections on the puddle of life

I spent yesterday in a strange state of ecstasy. It has partially worn off now, though some impression of it lingers. I felt at once joyful, ecstatic, overwhelmed, blissful. Sadness was there too, but only the impression of sadness, like a dark animal sleeping somewhere inside. I was everything and nothing. I was in love, I am in love. I was fulfilled and yet strangely empty. Here and not here. My appreciation, my sense of everything was heightened; I craved warmth, skin, contact with everyone and everything. I was dark as night and bright as the sun, everything at once. I wondered if this is how people feel when they feel they've touched the divine, except that what I was feeling was nothing to do with God unless God is called Cees Nooteboom and wrote a book called Lost Paradise.

These times when something has a profound impact on me are rare, but this book did it. I can't say what it is about it that is so perfect (and it is perfect) but this short little book profoundly altered me. I will feel its impact for days. I read it in two days and read it again. The only reason I'm not reading it now is that I don't think my nerves can take it.

Something in the book has stuck with me. I'll share it with you:

I would like to say something about my body, about how I have realised, more than ever, that it will be there only once, that it coincides with what I call 'me', but I reach a point where things can no longer be described in words. One cannot talk about ecstasy. And yet that is what I mean. I have never existed as much.

And that is how I felt. In this state of consuming awareness I wrote the following poem. It's not perfect, either as an expression of what I was feeling or as a poem in itself, but it's the first poen I've written in ages and it felt good.

The Dream and its Dreaming

Once I dreamed the world.
I dreamed the universe,
vast and dark;
I dreamed the stars, burning,
like a portent of love
so powerful that their light
shattered the illusion of night.
I dreamed you.

I dreamed of life
sluicing through time’s
open wound, filling the space
with a voice singing:
joy, sorrow, ecstasy, doom –
singing with one voice.

I dreamed the end.

I dreamed truth
and made it into a puzzle
only a child could solve.
I dreamed abstinence
and made it addictive.
I dreamed hope as an infinitely swollen pool.

I am the silence, the darkness
and everything in between.
I am the dream.