Brick by Brick

"Where does it end?"
"Where did it begin?"

We rise higher and higher, amazed at our progress, so amazed we become passe about it; it becomes expected.

It seems these two questions become larger, bolder, and farther away from being answered.

For several decades now, we've watched...mostly in denial...as increasing numbers of us become mad seeking these answers.

Like a rocket soaring skyward, we have marveled at our increasing altitude, yet the earth from which we began becomes distant...so distant it has almost vanished. We have even discovered a way to visit that real world as ghostly apparitions. We do so in a fake spirit while remaining aboard our soaring rocket.

Many care not, and only look skyward...and yet, when sometimes forced to gaze below...to truly gaze below...at how far we've traveled, the sight becomes so dizzying, so lost in context...it is disregarded and quickly, those forced to look downward for mere seconds, laugh it off, blow it off, tell themselves and others, "what does it matter?" 

Worse yet, they apply their medicine to the sight below, the vision they fear, create laws...commands..."thou shall only look forward and remember that looking back is but for fools!"

So terrified are they...not so much for the "mistakes made in the past" they pretend are their motives for rejection...but for the vanishing of the ground from which they have abandoned.

It seems so many have tempted themselves to still look below and see nothing but empty sky...even when told not to do it...they still wonder...and they come up empty;

"There's no 'there' there!"

And unlike those who have perfected denial and gaze only skyward, these "fools" seek answers to those questions and look for the ground that has disappeared.

That emptiness, these last few generations has led to fantasy worlds it seems. Whether by a drug of choice, prurient pleasures, or both...the chemicals that excite the physical body, mask the mind...

...for awhile.

Then, in an instant of sobriety, just for a second...reality ensues.

The ground...the real earth from which we once had a foundation...a connection...is nowhere be seen, yet we are told and we felt...it was once there.

It becomes too much. It was too much generations ago for many.

So few have found a way back...either having fallen back, or jumping back. Even fewer survive the fall.

It's an Eyesore. It's a work of art. It's the embodiment of a lifetime; full of error and success...incomplete, deteriorating as it builds...decay and growth...an honest interpretation of an honest life, complete.

There exists a man, one man it seems...who stayed behind. He began to leave this "soaring rocket" as a teenager over seventy years ago. He found a group that appeared to find a way to fall back and find the earth once again..yet even they were flying too high for him.

Somehow, he was gifted with a vision of the grounded earth...more real in his mind than in almost any other who desperately sought two feet firmly planted...a foundation that allowed for towers rather than rockets. He knew, early on...somehow...that to be utterly human, one had to remain truly grounded. He also knew that to be utterly human we still must build, we must work, we must forge ahead, in ever-increasing heights...while remaining part of a solid, grounded foundation.

And so, whether by divine providence or an intense undeniable impulse, he contracted an illness and coupled with the group he had joined shunning his eccentric hold on the ground...he left them, forever.

He embarked on his own, with the faith he was given. His faith told him, "stay grounded yet work skyward and do so alone if yet no one else sees the vision you have been gifted!"

And with that, he set course. He decided to honor his faith and build as no one man has done for centuries...so far has each man flown from the ground. So many other human beings have achieved so much, flown so high, yet have lost touch with the organic reality from which they were born...so much so that they have created amazing an elaborate edifices that mimic...in some ways obscenely...that of the real world, the real earth. They have all gotten together with their vapid constructs and created a matrix of artificial reality pretending that because they allow their feet to be swallowed into warm sand and can smell lilacs and persimmon...and even bath in the waters of this world...that they exist in this world spiritually, when in fact their spirits reside on a rocket light years above...immune to grasping, truly grasping the truth of the warm sand that envelopes their toes. They pretend to know and only the very few...maybe this only soul...this man with his vision and faith...can truly see how far from this world they are as they walk like ghosts amongst him.

So, after leaving his group...the group he thought would join him on his quest for the ground, he continued his journey. He began his walk on the true ground in an age where the two leaders of the two most powerful nations threatened to destroy both the reality he rediscovered and even the "rockets" in which most have lived. Each leader vowed to the other and to their people, they would not surrender.

The rest of the world, living in their constructs were terrified...not he. He began to build and work, finding remnants of the discarded "trash" thrown away by all the others...brick by brick, stone by stone he built. One of those leaders finally relented and surrendered. The rest of the world breathed once again. They were so relieved, they built literal rockets from their spiritual rocket and turned their visions to the literal space above. They truly became part of the fantasy they have been constructing for so many years.

As the rest of the world rejoiced and set upon not only truly looking skyward but shattering all remnants of earthly shackles once and for all...discovering the joy and beauty in art and music that blossomed as they cut their cords completely...this man, this lonely soul said not a word to any of them and continued to lay those discarded remnants...one on top of another. Brick by brick, stone by stone.

He mimicked, almost purposefully, their folly as they all joined together to build their own new worlds...far above him. As they "built", he built...all alone. Brick by brick, stone by stone.

The scattered remnants they discarded were hastily gathered by him and he used them, almost in mock fashion to build his world...a world that would forever be connected to the real ground. He built without the edifices of science and study that commanded obedience to the rigid "method". He instead was guided only by the faith that he knew was the foundation of man. His knowledge was "stillborn" to the context of the matrix that watched. He did not possess the myriad evolutions that rose far above his world that taught the collective how to proceed. He defied all their rules and instead relied on only the organic simple idea of " size and proportions" as his creation grew.

Years were now passing. The other world, that rocketed skyward lost sight of this foolish man, and had long since proclaimed him the only thing those who are too terrified to look downward could; a "madman". 

They further ignored him as they must...and only...only upon inventing new gadgets as they rocketed farther into their galaxies...did they look back upon him with arrogant curiosity and amusement. Yet in those years that they traveled, farther and faster...away from their true foundations, his build upon that true foundation reached epic proportions. His build became a cathedral. His build was his and his alone. For an entire adult lifetime he built, brick by brick, stone by stone. He was decades in age past those of the other world, who twenty years younger than he is now, stopped helping the rocket blast skyward, and instead rested on their beds of riches awaiting death and more eager of it as their years on the rocket continued. Yet he, at ninety-two-years-old, carries on, brick by brick, stone by stone and his build is looked upon in amazement and horror by those who pay him a visit in their ghostly apparitions upon his real world. Sometimes, he is infected by their folly and casts an insult at the obscene appearance of a female "ghost" in tight shorts as she haunts his monument in sad curiosity, he acts like Christ in the gambler's temple. Other wise, he ignores them.

He built in reality as the rest of the world created another reality. The rest of us have yet and may never realize...the reality is one within...not of this earth but deep within.

The more they look upon him now in amazement, horror and ridicule because not only do they not understand...they truly cannot.

They have risen so far up, that to glance upon him now with any concept of the real world would cause an angst and terror so profound they may even join those sad but increasing few who have killed themselves and even rarer but even more growing...those few who have taken others with them in their terror of finding those questions unanswered yet seeing this one man answer them completely. 

The world apart from his...his reality...his grounded foundation...his faith, his true, organic purpose is more in danger of collapsing than his gravity defying monument.

Yet those who look downward upon him and walk into his presence as apparitions of what was once truly human, see it the other way around. They wait in folly, amused, as he nears his last time in this world...and their's.

His build will never be completed. It's size and scope, it's subjective beauty...sublime to those who fear not to look down...is eschewed by many others; ugly and haphazard. So much of the world will glimpse with wild curiosity and laugh, shake their heads and turn their sights skyward, happy in their construct, while forever fleeing all that is human.

Brick by brick, stone by stone.