My name is Uma Berlin and these are my musings of a yogi.
I'm in a forest surrounded by trees.
They're so,
So very tall.
I crane my neck as I look up.
Straight,
Long lines of pine shooting up to the sky seemingly without end.
The air smells moist of earth and that particular smell of redwood forest,
Moss and needles and damp wood.
I hear a woodpecker in the distance chattering away.
But besides that,
It is silent.
I am all alone here.
I am all alone here.
Alone here,
Alone,
Alone person.
I am the only one.
There are no other people.
As much as I may believe that there are other beings here,
Others who are striving and yearning and clambering and hoping and being lost alongside me,
There aren't.
I can hear my own breath now as I climb.
Breathing heavier as the air gets thinner and I'm slowly making it up a steep incline.
Alone here.
Where is here?
What is a place even?
It is a belief.
It is an agreement.
It is a filter through which I look around me and see the outline of certain shapes and colors,
Smell some things,
Understand what is happening to the light as it strikes these objects and shapes and decide,
This is this place.
But it's all in my head.
It's all just a figment of wispy imaginations that go on spinning fluffy fantasies.
Because there is no place,
Just as there are no people.
I do not exist.
I was never,
I never will be.
And yet,
I am always,
And I am everywhere,
And I am here.
I am a mist trickling across the silent forest.
A slow,
Dense fog that covers it all.
I am the sound of running water in the distance,
Bubbling water that bounces over a rock and turns over a log and that little frogs jump across and dance with.
I am a dancing frog.
I make a sound from the back of my foot and my friend responds from across the way.
Someone's coming.
It is no one,
Because no one is here.
I can hear the echo of my own mind.
The shadow,
Yet it is all empty and no one has said a word.
A word,
What is a word?
A combination of sounds that roll together up the tongue,
Languid liquid,
And an image magically appears.
Yet,
These words are empty because they have no actual tangible inherent meaning.
They are conjurers.
They are magicians,
These words,
These wordcasters.
A word arises and a seed is planted,
And that seed embeds itself deep in the rich soil of this forest,
This fake forest,
And give it time,
Some water,
And good old fashioned prayer and belief.
There we go.
A shoot rises up and spindles its way up,
Up,
Up towards the sky like all the others.
It only exists because we imagined it,
Believed it to be so.
The mist now sinks down lower,
Covering most of the earth.
I cannot see my own feet.
I have no feet.
It rises up higher and higher to my waist.
I am disappearing.
I am no longer existing but for this fog that is swallowing me whole.
Swallow me up.
Disappear me.
It is painless because it is what I wanted all along,
To not exist even in memory anymore,
To vanish completely.
To be erased,
Erase me,
Erase this mind which is playing old jingles and stupid pop songs and regurgitating old stale ideas and information and soundbites that mean absolute nonsense.
It's all just noise,
These things that take so much attention and that pretend to be so important because the only thing that is and ever was never really was born.
And as the fog climbs higher and higher onto me,
I am dissolving.
I take a breath in and out.
I begin to see that the fog is my breath.
It pulses with me,
Swirls inside of me and I am so translucent.
I can see the swirling fog of breath swooping in and out,
In and out.
I see the pulse of my own so-called life,
My prana,
As it bobs up and down,
Ebbs and flows,
With the fog of breath that I consume and gulp and which then escapes me.
The fog is now up to my neck and I am but a head atop a thick billowy smoky field.
My eyes are closed and a gentle smile is on my face.
I consume me and up it goes and I vanish.
Poof.
