The wind blew cold from the west and I sat in the coffee shop staring out the dusty pane at the people moving in their little blinks of time and all I could think was:
“we are all here together and we don’t even know it.“
Somewhere in this shifting sandstorm of days and faces, somebody said truth was a man on a mountain or a quiet room or the inside of your skull echoing with the sound of God or madness. But I don’t think so. I think truth is in the crash and the hum and the jazz of life’s collective roar.
The truth is not me staring out this window. The truth is all of us, the whole damn flock of us, stirring the same soup, dancing to the same distant drum, even if we pretend we don’t hear it.
I used to think the world was mine to witness. That “I” was the star and the rest of the cast was just a mob of extras muttering lines while I figured out the meaning of everything. But that’s just the foolishness of youth, the lonely myth of a soul spinning solo in a crowded world.
You live long enough, or love deep enough, and you start to see it. The weft and warp of the thing. The net of being. We are not atoms bouncing blind, we are breath passed back and forth between bodies, fireflies blinking in chorus, and if one light goes out, the whole field darkens a little.
Reality’s a riddle anyway. A cracked mirror, a fleeting glimpse, a kaleidoscope spun by chance and blood and memory. You see it your way and I see it mine and neither of us is wrong exactly but neither of us is right either, not alone.
Perception is a trickster, he’ll dress up a shadow and sell it as a fact, give you dreams stitched into logic and call it proof. You can’t trust it alone. You need more eyes. You need the crowd. You need the ones you love and the ones you hate and the ones you’ll never understand to help you make sense of what this all is.
And individuality, don’t get me wrong, it’s beautiful. It’s the spice, the song, the flick of color in the mural. We paint our lives with our own weird brushes, our busted palettes, our hiccupped metaphors and bittersweet songs. But no painting means a damn thing without a wall to hang it on, a room for others to walk through and wonder and feel and say, “I see it too”.
See, the great con is the idea that we’re separate. That we earn meaning like we earn paychecks. That you build truth with your bare hands like a backyard fence and nobody else has a say in where it goes.
But truth, real truth, is a communion. It’s not the moralists or the philosopher or the popes. It’s everybody at the table passing the bread.
We are not the truth alone. The “I” is a dot on the map. The truth is the road itself, the long and winding one we stumble down together with laughter and mistakes and dirty boots and open hearts. You can scream your truth to the heavens and still it won’t echo right until someone hears it, catches it like a tossed stone, and says, me too, brother. That’s when it becomes real. That’s when it matters.
So let the philosophers chase their tail down lonely halls and let the gurus whisper in their caves, but I’ll sit here with the wild ones, the broken ones, the tired, joyful, half-awake ones, all of us pouring our tea and sharing our crumbs and our strange, stubborn hope that none of this is in vain.
Because truth, if it lives anywhere, lives in the space between us. In the glances that say “I see you,” in the hands that hold each other up, in the long silences that don’t feel lonely. Not me. Not you. But us. The Great Cosmic We.
That’s the message I’ve come to believe. The rest is noise.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.