Look up at me

For I am dying

I mean, not right now

Well

What is now?

Perhaps my frail body will manage to continue to crawl around on this spinning ball for another 50 years

And that is a BIG perhaps

I will probably die way before then

But say I got another 50 years (a good portion with the docs and on drugs)

What is 50 years?

Well, universally speaking, it is now.

50 years is not even a snap of the universe's fingers

It took billions of years for life just to get here.

So yeah I am dying

Now

You are dying now

Somehow, by a stroke of luck, or providence

It matters not how you define it

You and I ended up in this same strange time and place

Dying together

You and I

So if you could just dig down deep to find an ounce of courage in this fearful world, and look up from your screen

Even if just for a moment (Sure, we can pretend it was an accident)

Then maybe we can fall in love

like humans used to

before screens

Before screens tricked the dying into believing they were not

And had men hooked on this poison

Everything is nothing

Nothing matters

It's the prevailing thought

21st century mantra

Post-modern drool of intellectual depression

Pretending our minds are capable of defining anything worth believing anyway

Nothing is everywhere, it is what permeates, it is all that is true

Or maybe it is God

Perhaps God is everywhere

What we define as nothing is just something we can't understand

And we are only capable of thinking in terms of the particular amount of language that we grasp

And all understanding or at least potential for understanding past this language restraint is not nonexistent, it is just unmapped

It has never been given definition

Perhaps our nothing is just God trying to break through the bounds of our weak minds, throttled by its numerous restraints

But you are smarter than that

yet I still remember the very moment I lost myself

Glaring depravity

A sense of failure

The heaviness of betrayal

Beyond any measure of redemption that I had ever believed in

Understanding nothing of the gospel

Save the part about my sin

The curse of my own deceit

And the ever present fact that I was alone

Not just literally speaking

Alone in every sense

And partial understandings of things such as gospels can be worse than no understanding at all

Maybe it was just some unlucky star

Powerless

That I begged for more than magic to fill the chasm of my aching heart

Angry not because this magic never came-

But because I no longer believed in its very existence.

Enraged at my maker in a way I could not put into words

Clinging to very last knot of the very last rope

That was my quickly unravelling sanity

Unravelling faster than our ever expanding universe

That I cannot even begin to comprehend

My front row seat

To viewing the death of faith

And not just any faith

My own

So I looked out into the stars

Wishing I was a tree

Or a dog

They don't care about such things

I still remember being 13 locked in my room

Laying on my bed, staring at the ceiling

Drowning in the sounds of Sonic Youth

Hypnotized by the blades of my ceiling fan

And in that moment, that was all that mattered

I was happy

Now, I'm middle aged

Burned out on rock n' roll

And I can't pillow my head without the weight of the stars suffocating me with questions I cannot even bear to try to answer

So I look out into the stars again

Then it occurs to me that for reasons I cannot explain

Every time

And I mean every single time

That I look into the night sky

My heart

That same heart that I have been toiling to understand all my life

The same heart that gives birth to the most harrowing of thoughts

My heart, in awe, cries beauty!

Before my heart can even interrupt my mind to consider my condition

Beauty!

Before I even begin to be haunted by my old familiar devils

Beauty!

for some reason a light wave emitted an uncountable amount of years ago

From a star unimaginable in its very existence

Traversed an unmeasurable distance through space

Reached my eye at just the moment I turned it toward the heavens

And that light wave

Tickled some tissue in my eye

That sent a vibration down a nerve

To my brain that decodes everything I touch, taste, hear, smell, and see

and with just one look

within one brief moment

placed this feeling of awe within my heart.

And this is every evidence of God I need

To hell with understanding

It would take an awful little god to be understood by men

So from one dying man to another

Look up my brother

Look up my sister

Look up