A peak experience in a roofless world
An astrologer who is also an expert in astronomy wrote a meditation after sleeping outside his California home many nights to seek relief from Indian Summer temperatures
“It started out as an escape from the stuffiness and heat in our solar-cooked house,” says the author. “Then it became more like a vision quest.”
BY HUNTER REYNOLDS — Roofless World
There’s nothing romantic or liberating about it—
this cowering in a sleeping bag watching the twinkling menace collapsing the screen tent
of who I think I am.
It is not some primordial exercise of freedom.
A landlord still hovers.
The rent is still exorbitant.
In only one way
is it easier out here:
I stop my pining
for a dishonest night’s sleep—
a break from the void’s incessant grooming.
Insignificance, I decide,
will never stop dragging
it’s pestering comb
across my scalp.The best I can hope for:
An achy dawn,
motivation to admit
what coyotes can’t articulate
and Buddhas wildly howl:It takes a Gortex kind of silence
to withstand
this roofless world.Sleeping inside, my body feels thick, void-less.
My mind: a sophisticated kind of groaning.
Outside, aging edges fray.
Like a piece of meat sandwiched between planet and stars, the universe bites into me.
Enlightenment: being chewed.
Hunter: A Great encapsuling of that moment. I’ve been there too, and it transforms like nothing else.
Thank you!
What I love about this poem is that so much spiritual writing idealizes the breadth of the heavens as a benevolent property — almost out of a New Age ‘political correctness’ — when, in reality, space is literally overwhelming to the mind.
Hunter expresses it beautifully with the line:
” . . .watching the twinkling menace
collapsing the screen tent
of who I think I am.”
Hunter,
It is beautiful!
I’m reminded of the section in Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy about the “Infinite Perspective Vortex” where you are show the immense scope of the universe with a little arrow saying “You Are Here”.