This mission – this curse – has taken my life and hidden it away. It’s put it on the top shelf and I can’t reach. All I see is this rotten thing; I don’t see who I am, I don’t see my dreams, my hopes, my desires, my destiny – they are all lost, because I stand here in darkness far beneath the earth.

And then – to die after this – I spit the word out – after experiencing nothing – like salt in the wound, how would it even feel? For to die mustn’t one first have lived? Be settled and content with the person they are and have become? They must surely be ready to let go only because they have known and tasted the beauty and the tragedy of life; they have felt its treasures and it’s tears, and left the room exhausted and sweaty with the experience of it.

That is the very nature of isolation – believe it or not. This is the ultimate cruelty. It allows one to live but not truly live – it allows one to hope but takes away the courage to truly dream. For while I breathe, while my heart beats and my eyes blink – I know deep in my heart that at any moment, my heart could stop beating, my brain could falter, the electricity in my body could turn off like a light bulb and I would fall down, face on the floor, to be found by the next person that walks by. I have already stolen so many good years from its clutches. It’s a sword that hangs above my head, hanging by a thread. Tell me, who could live their life this way?

One might think that it’s far easier to let go of this earth and all its worldly desires when one has really experienced all it has to offer. That is to say, when one has lived a fulfilling, satisfying, satiated life. How easy it must be for those who have had a career, loves, children, success! How simple it would be to say: “goodbye world, I have taken all I can from you, I am saturated and seek no more of my worldly desires” than to walk away having experienced nothing… having only such tired legs and a longing for what one can never have. How difficult it must be when one has achieved absolutely nothing. How the echo of failure and a destiny of obscurity make dying such a difficult and painful process!

Sometimes there’s a little ripple. It’s nearly undetectable, like the ripple of the air when an empty pillowcase falls. It can barely be noticed. Try to hear it, try to hold your breath and listen. Any sound, any movement, any distraction will just pull us away and we’ll miss it. It was the ripple of the air when a feather falls in another room. It was a single soft whisker of breeze tickling your neck so lightly it’s almost not even there, it’s almost nothing even at all.

It was this kind of little tickle of a ripple that happened in the air when the hucklebird fluttered to a stop and landed in the fig tree. It caused these invisible little raindrops to splatter out into the air causing more invisible little ripples everywhere to reflect and to bounce and to stretch out like rain dancing on a pond. And in response these little raindrops caused more ripples which caused other things. And suddenly it affected the air, and the leaves, the little twigs the leaves were attached to, which shook the tree as well. In such small quivers, mind you, that they were nearly positively undetectable. But they were there, in the trunk, the ground and the grasses, rippling through the air, that one event changing the nature of the day in limitless and unending ways.

The hucklebird closed its eyes. When it did, the world disappeared and was replaced into a palette of brown and black. And then when he opened his eyes again he was home, he was in the nest and his mother and his father were there. He was small again, like he used to be with such a big beak; it covered half of his head. Everything was clumsy and bright, but he took the food that he was given and swallowed it with a big gulp. It was nutty and sweet and a little oily and nothing ever felt so good. The hucklebird was sentient in his own world and he tasted and he felt and he shivered from his memories.

Then the hucklebird opened its eyes again and he was in the fig tree once more with the blues and grays of the evening sky, the wind here and there across its feathers and eyes. It was aware and it was watching the world.

Then the bird closed its eyes again. This time it was flying.

You’re too young to be allowed to know this, and I have no choice but to tell you. I am dying and have rot in my bones. My children have abandoned me. But forget all this. Listen to me.

The four elemental particles? Air, fire, earth and water? They are nothing! They are powerless in the Universe; because they are tied helplessly to our own plane of perception. They can’t even exist outside of our own little planet. There are other things which are far more powerful, that transcend all planes; all macrocosms and microcosms from atoms and their little quarks and gluons all the way up to twisting planets swinging around flocks of shooting stars spiraling through greater and greater macrocosms which they themselves are only a part of.

What we wanted to find, Adam and me - God I loved him - was a path to understanding what all this shit was. All this around us. Because we knew that anything that means anything - anything fucking real - couldn’t exist just on our own planet, or macrocosm for that matter, but must transcend every plane everywhere, and must exist and repeat in each one, every planet, over and over in differing gradients of size, but acting with identical properties everywhere, every single plane of perception, no matter the observer or the metrics.