From the Beach...

 Last Thursday, as I do most weeks I have a day off and the weather is nice, I went down to the beach to read a few comics, eat my breakfast and ponder life and the universe and everything.

I read Batman Annual #1 and it made me cry...it was one of those days anyway, where my moods felt brittle, like cheap glass or too-dry straw.  I was living right on the cutting edge of my emotions in my mind. 

My problem was that I couldn't reconcile two seperate ideas. 

1.  Love is the most important thing there is.

2.  All love is an illusion, a LIE, an intangible created only in one's mind and subject to the petty whims of fate and foolish humanity.

Both statements "feel" true to me, but also, if not contradictory, at least misguidedly dangerous.

So I finished my Tim Horton's and I put my comics away and I walked along my beach, along the edge of where the ocean meets the land just like in the song, feeling blue and confused about the nature of the universe and my part in it. 

A stick the approximate size and shape of a magic marker floated right up to my feet from Lake Ontario so I bent and retrieved it.  Then, when I came to the (arbitrarily) correct spot, I wrote in the sand, right at the waterline, I wrote a message to God or the Universe or whatever.

? Here I AM.  What do you want ?

I stripped down to my shorts and meditated on the sand.  I cleared my mind and waited for an answer.  I waited about an hour, listening to the waves, the gulls, feeling the sun play hide and seek with the clouds, feeling the wind blow around and through me, feeling isolated, insulated in my own private world even as I sat on the very edge of the largest city in Canada. 

& then the answer came.

"NOTHING"

Nothing at all.  What could God or the Universe or whatever possibly need from me?  Alone, I am insignificant.  A single grain of sand, a drop of water, a single cog in a vast, vast machine. 

Alone I am nothing

BUT

Together WE are everything.

Whatever I'm "supposed" to be doing, I'm doing it now.  I can no more help doing it that the waves can help crashing into shore.  I could no more STOP doing it than I could stop the moon from circling the Earth.

I might not know what I'm contributing, but we are all a part of one thing...the same thing, the ONLY thing.  Everything is ONE.  And although I'm unable to see the entire picture, nor judge it's worth, nor influence it in any meaningful way, at least I can take comfort in knowing that we are all a part of it, all a part of something much, much larger than our own insignificant little selves. 

So I guess that's something, right?