Rolling along it were globs of dough, squirted down onto the belt by some kind of mechanic operation hanging down from above.
They were in a vacuum, the regular dark of the mindspace cushioning them in silence.
Then came the leaves and the trees - once again, I was in a forest. But color never faded into the scene, apart from what existed in the dough. Everything was an intense, metallic pewter. Solid, sharp, and heavy. The forest floor was carpeted by a mossy sheet of small, dark, matt little balls of steel. It moved like a sheet of chain mail, and was so dense that none of the little balls ever came out of place. The trees were sparse and formed a low canopy maybe 20 feet at most off the ground - their bark was made of sheets of metal like everything else, and their leaves were bladelike in the way they hung down from their branches.The one conveyor belt I'd seen initially was not the only one. This forest only existed for the sake of the conveyor belts, it seemed, or at least nothing lived here apart from it. It just kept spitting out these blobs of dough and they kept moving away to god knows where - it was assumed that something more would happen to them than just this.
It was at this point that it became clear to me that I was the product of this dough; I was dough, every part of me. My body was the same one I described in my last entry, and the same one present in my meditation from last week, which I didn't write about - a very plain, very androgynous body with mid-back-length wavy blonde hair.
I walked forward, alongside the conveyor belt, and stopped by a tree to examine the leaves. I cut my index finger clean off in the process, but it only stung a little. I picked the finger back up and examined it - a white layer of clay, pink, red, and tan: all the different layers that would be in a finger, just made of dough. I stuck it back on again and reappeared in the tree. The branches must have been cold, but I didn't feel them.
As if in explanation, some kind of incredible power surged through my body and shot out through my fingertips, sending medusa-like projectiles from my arms to every conveyor belt dough spout within a 300 foot radius. Out of my body poured dough - or perhaps it was sucked, drawn out, leeched out, vacuumed - and upon having injected what was necessary into this system, my power was completely drained. But I refused to remain weak, and so I gathered more, somehow, feeding from the surroundings, from the cold, from the lifelessness.
Understand, this cold and lifelessness and monochrome comes in stark contrast to the past few months. I have been on beautiful adventures and seen beautiful things. But there was some kind of unstoppable dark power in the utter defiance of this ecosystem's self-perpetuating death... It was alive, but only seemed to exist to prove how unliving and hostile and mechanical it could be.
A kind of invisible, silent vibration rose from the earth and formed a sheath around my body, and I drew it into myself, harvesting this power to whirl myself up above the leaf canopy, completely unhindered by, perhaps simply invincible to, the seemingly-lethal edges on both sides of every leaf.
Not going to lie, it was something like being in the avatar state. That's pretty close to what it was. My hair was rippling with static potential and wind, my fingers were tingling with power, and with every moment in the air and every moment I was able to see this wretched, indifferent expanse, I became stronger and angrier until.... something in my gut erupted.
My eyes lit up with a kind of lightning, as though anyone that so much dared look at them, at me, would have their corneas burned out (probably along with the rest of their face). Lightning shot from my core through my fingers and down through my feet to the trees below - but nothing burned, though the impulse was conducted from one side to the opposite side of the entire planet within seconds, because it was all just cold, hard steel.
The universe I was in seemed to feed off of that self-frustration. It generated more electricity and produced more dough. Thriving off of the explosion occurring in the sky above them, the trees all just seemed to ask for more, which gave me more power even as it infuriated me (since they refused to burn). The same beams shot out through my limbs again - every finger, every hair on my body, every toe, simply pouring out immense bolts of lightning from a completely unknown source in my gut. Sustaining this hold, I raised my arms and my eyes up to the sky, projecting it all somewhere beyond, commanding it to fall, to humble itself. There was some kind of brittle, flat, slate sky far, far away that received the bolts and shook, cracked, and crumbled, and the pieces catapulted down as though being sucked in by a black hole.I remained completely invincible to this catapulting of slate meteorites, unsatisfied with the results - because it only grew, the more I tried to destroy it, the more viciously it gobbled up my attacks. And so the more vicious I became - the more intensely my eyes burned and the more fiercely my hair sizzled and the more pointed my teeth became and the more utterly neutral my expression seemed and the more fiercely my limbs swung lasers around as though it were some kind of apocalyptic light show... But this would not, could not, end. That Ola Gjeilo piece, Tundra, that I linked from my last entry? It had been transposed to some other, more ominous minor key, and to full orchestra, but half of that orchestra was playing on the wrong side of their bridges, and half the choir was shrieking.
The next slate sky, a world beyond the one I had broken, shattered and fell; and the next; and the next, and the world of chaos just kept growing and growing, seeming to bristle with the energy it was feeding itself. But it was never enough, it kept growing - though everything was still cold, my arms became flamethrowers as well, a kind of sun, a combustion engine, a bringer of defiant, unliving death. I was in these three states at once: the naïve, new, quiet piece of raw dough; the witchlike provider of dough, peer of the trees; and the godlike, wrathful beast, attempting to destroy the world by expanding it... or perhaps expand the world by destroying it.
It was fairly nightmarish and by 45 minutes in, I was very, very tired. Horrified. But it wasn't horrified because I didn't know why it was there or what it was telling me, teaching me. I was horrified because it was such a perfect depiction.
I've been very frustrated of late with a great number of things. It, like this world I entered into, has been a fairly quiet but extremely explosive presence. I am frustrated with myself for lacking the self-control to be as responsible as I need to be; for forgetting things I need to remember; for having chosen to be where I am (as per this post to Apostrophe); for caring about things I probably would do better not to care about; for the death of a past I could never have saved. Infuriation about the state of Christianity and of Calvin and of those things I was always promised would be freeing but discovered not to be. Anger that I believed for so long and kept trying to when I always knew in the back of my mind how good it would feel to throw it away. I hate to admit it, but this world is a fairly accurate depiction of my soul from this past week, and living it through Meeting was the most cathartic spiritual experience I could have had.
But I have found myself numb. I think it's simply true, on a descriptive, existential level, that Spirit leaves us sometimes. Well, I don't mean that it's not there, but perhaps that we are absent from Spirit. I'm unsure at times how to solve anything in my life productively, how not to engage self-destruction when I get the urge. Perhaps writing about this will create some type of calm. I find it more realistic to believe that that's not how this story will end, because that would seem disingenuous. I hope for more beautiful days with calmer weather; for big swallows to ride through the arboretum, valleys with blossom patchworks, orcas and soft sails and warm fires and children and waterfalls. I'd prefer that. But until then, perhaps this is how Spirit's urging me to hold my own issues in the light.
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