Things I am Unable to Capture

digital / slightly rendered / 2022

An Amish boy walking down the lane after a day's work;

Horses on the next farm neighing in the evening light;

The scrubbing of fall leaves.  The smell of fresh manure on a fallow cornfield.

I can't describe the breeze that arose at sundown.

So I am left with a smudge of moonlight through the quickening clouds.

~

Jack Kerouac

a letter he wrote to his first wife, Edie in 1957

Selected Letters 1957-1969

digital / slightly rendered / winter 2018

“I have lots of things to teach you now, in case we ever meet, concerning the message that was transmitted to me under a pine tree in North Carolina on a cold winter moonlit night. It said that Nothing Ever Happened, so don’t worry. It’s all like a dream.

Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds.

But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity.

It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing.

It’s a dream already ended. There’s nothing to be afraid of and nothing to be glad about.

I know this from staring at mountains months on end. They never show any expression, they are like empty space. Do you think the emptiness of space will ever crumble away?

Mountains will crumble, but the emptiness of space, which is the one universal essence of mind, the vast awakenerhood, empty and awake, will never crumble away because it was never born.”

~