It is late and my mind should be drifting through the colorful abyss of deep sleep, yet tonight sleep will not come. I am like a hungry flower who dreams of bees so ardently that all thoughts of pollen and nectar disappear; the world for which I long has crumbled into a fine mist of cool air and gentle breezes. All around me I see an endless expanse of elemental forces populated by all that is imagined and imaginable. The gap between what is and what could be is more immense than any bridge, and spans a gauntlet of sorrow, deprivation, ugliness, and injustice. Looking into the dead of night I strain until light emerges from darkness, and my body burns with a tectonic passion, shifting the plates that divide just from unjust until all is made whole again.

I feel a ferocious desire to be a poet and a monk, to explore and to contemplate, to salute beauty and solve sorrow. The very nature of existence stings me like a sandstorm that then abates, revealing a perfectly sculpted dune in the middle of an ocean of pulverized rock. A force that pervades all living things like some sort of never ending lightning bolt passes through the veins in my body and the synapses in my brain; it is a passion that murders me repeatedly, as though bliss were a wave washing up on the shore, alive, only to be dragged back to sea to die again.

Tonight, and on many nights when the tired and the weary cling to their pillows, I wallow in a whirl of contradictions that light up my body like a metropolis seen from space. I am distant, yet close, a sound emanating from within and without. My joints are testaments to the unbelievable reach of time and the brevity of existence. I raise my antique arms in praise and protest, saluting eternity and damning mortality. I let my head fall into the arms of a darkness made darker by the light, and feel free of everything, especially death.

I refuse to believe that anything must be as it is, yet I accept things as they are–for now. I burn with a violent impatience, feeling immensely content yet unsettled by the needless suffering and injustice that surrounds me and that I create. Do not tell me that something cannot be done, and do not dare to tell me poverty and pollutions are products of fate. The only acceptable path for me is one defined by an unimaginable bliss that is tempered only by the work that there is to do–work that requires passion, creativity, and bliss.

Tonight, day-to-day concerns mingle with musings of the eternal. Feasibility studies become poetry. Mysticism pervades the mundane. Death casts a shadow on drudgery, but illuminates the wide open plains of contemplation and action. The statue of the thinker rises from his pose to leap into Myanmar and stop genocide, only to return to his ruminations. Monks vacate their caves and their mountain abodes to do battle with bureaucracy. Travelers return home to remake their myopic towns in accordance with a cosmopolitan vision. Tonight nothing exists but existence. The ubiquitous yet oft-ignored oneness of things bursts forth like a solar eclipse, making the entire geology of the Earth pause as it stares into space and blinks away tears that roll down its ravines and into rivers, streams, and immense oceans. . .