It is my opinion that we don’t think in big enough terms. Our metaphors and similes fall short.
When I say ‘we’ and ‘our,’ I am speaking for the average American in the here and now. I can’t speak for the little boy that navigates through the lanterns and balgha laid out like fish at Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar any more than I can speak for the first Lakota to pierce his flesh in the ritual performance of the sun dance.
If there are any among us who can still discern the secrets that are inherent in every object, or the epic nature of the most seemingly insignificant events, it is the religious woman or man. I say this with hesitancy. I do not mean to say that a person who calls himself religious is automatically indoctrinated into some secret society of Seers. I mean to say that religion is one of the only lenses left in modern times through which to see the world as more than what it seems, material and static.
Everything is bigger and more wonderful than it seems at first glance.
Right now I am working my way through Keats’s poetry, and I just finished Endymion. My reading of this major poem happened to coincide with Tyler getting in a bad car accident and breaking his back. I love when things align just so and everything becomes clearer.
Endymion, who falls in love with Cynthia, goddess of the moon, undertakes a journey through the cavernous depths of the earth, past sleeping Adonis and Venus and her doves, to the bottom of the sea, through Neptune’s palace, through the atmosphere on the back of a winged steed. All for love.
I can’t claim such fantastic experiences myself, but, when you’re in love, every moment and every glance takes on epic and magical qualities. We take so much for granted. Not just in terms of loved ones we can lose in a moment’s shifting of the universe’s weight, but simpler things, too. I don’t want to see a door as a door. I want to see it as a threshold opening into every possible corridor or chamber in the maze of actuality and possibility. I don’t want heartbreak to be a sugarcoated few nights of depression. I want it to be the descent into hell that it is. And I don't want love to be a convenient routine you fall into with someone who conveniently has the same habits. I want love to be otherworldly and strange and beautiful and dangerous.
Tyler is alive and well, and everything around me promises More if I just take the time to look.
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