I'm overwhelmed, so let me just be here, now, with you.

For the last week or so, I've been dogpaddling the quicksand of inner space, observing my shallow and ungrateful habits in this weird trance, the way it might feel to look at a video of myself in a drunken blackout. Not that I have ever done that. (In fact, I have not. Mercifully, video cameras were somewhat of a rarity back when I was a drunk.) But in any case, had I actually seen myself covered in blue fingerpaint making out with some online gamer chick behind the broken deep freeze, I bet it would've felt like this, like the mix of bewilderment, distance, and wonder (read: horror, denial and shock) which, in the right combination at just the right temperature, gives birth to Samadhi.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Samadhi might be best described as a flash of enlightenment. It's a big deal like deja vu is a big deal. Meaning, it's not. But it isn't nothing, either. It's something. It's a tiny epiphany, a moment of clarity, a spiritual orgasm. It's that spaced out, tuned in moment looking out the window on the bus when you realize that not only could that homeless guy be you, that homeless guy IS you, and so is his piss in a mad dog bottle, and the bed of daffodils he's crashed out in, and the sun shining on it all. You get me. Samadhi is a swift hot smack in the face of the neatly sorted and sanctioned notions of Get Along Move Along that we carry with us most days. I think meditation is the proposed front door to this kind of consciousness growth spurt, but everyone I know gets in some other way. You might experience Samadhi during an acid flashback, you might get it watching made for TV dramas examining latch key kids and the resilience of the adolescent lanyard. I got it last week when I found out that my first love, Micah, shot himself.

I have labored over whether I would tell you that. It isn't nice to read, I know. And I'm sorry if it hurts you to think about it right this minute. It hurts me, too. But listen, when I got that news, it was like a sonic boom, like a hundred sonic booms, like the freaking Air and Water Show up in here. I holed up for a few days and tried to work out the tangled mess in my heart, and then I gave up on that and started walking around again. I've got his letters in my bag. I look at his picture every hour. Totally normal grief stuff. No big thing.

Here's the big thing, though. The morning after I got the news, I made a smoothie and I thought: Micah doesn't get to make smoothies anymore. Then on the bus: no more buses for Micah. I waited in a stupid line and imagined it may well have been stupid lines that Micah couldn't bear. I did some brainless work for brainless dollars and figured maybe Micah wouldn't tolerate the emptiness of labor and money. I hugged my friends as if they were possibly, quietly, unsure if they'd ever been loved. I taught my students imagining that they may well be in class as a last ditch effort to find something worth living for. As I walked through the sun downtown and tried to get my head around love and death, I heard the narration of my life as emo rock lyrics, and so I took a picture (above). I understood, as I think honest people do, that my deeply unique existence was in fact a cliche in its entirety, a theme and variations with vital applications in New Age, Goth, inspirational, Metal, Classical, Romantic, Gangsta, Alternative, Folk, Trance, Post-Mod, Pop, Renaissance, Soul, R&B, Grunge, Zombie, Disco, New Wave, Honky Tonk, Punk, Bluegrass, and Electronica, to name only a few. It's an ego-maniac's nightmare, that everybody's living the same story, but I'm afraid the hippies might have gotten it right. We really are all one love. God damn it.

Samadhi* is seeing the dual become the non-dual. Samadhi is a moment of grasping that life and death, love and war, bliss and suffering, are one. The sacred and the secular, the strange and the ordinary, the banal and the profound - same same. Samadhi is a state of understanding that there is no reason for being, and that every last breath carries with it the power of all known and unknown universes. It is the sick and fitting placement of Micah's suicide next to our first kiss as mirror images, observing how Micah has, twice now, shaken my mind, marked my heart, opened my eyes to the essential chimera of this life. For that, I thank him, wherever he is. (Micah, where are you? And do you wish you were here? I do.) For now, I think that's as much as I can say.

Until next time, I leave you with the cliche of your choice, paired with a heaping helping of accidental and temporary enlightenment.  (I'm pretty sure you want the temporary one. I hear the permanent stuff is a real bitch.)

Love,
Karen


*Samadhi is of course, really complex and bigger than I can explain, but so is everything else, and I can't wait until I understand. Do you want to argue with me about it? Because I would enjoy that very much.