FEAR

Sometimes being in this cell is a comfort. I am afforded the space to be fearlessly lucid; to see things with a clarity that details what the dominant reality truly is: as opposed to the intriguing, deceptively beguiling veneer and the fear that stops us from seeing things as they really are.

Inside these four walls I do not have to compromise my perception because I am compromised by my actions.

I do nothing therefore I can think everything through with a clarity and honesty that penetrates the often self imposed haze of preconception and dogma; the recitations detailing right and wrong and morals and values and views and opinions. And if you ever wake up you realize that your identity was handed to you as a puzzle in a box and you put it together incorrectly: squashing pieces into spaces where different parts were supposed to go.

Out there the frenetic pace of living becomes a distraction and when people can become anything they want, they choose to be one of those gaudy, clay garden gnomes.

For all of the supposed sophistication and nouveau-cultured civilization there are very few trees left in the forest of humanity: mostly it’s just shrubs and weeds and creepers trying to cling onto the exposed roots of the few giants who once stood tall, or those who remain towering for now; mostly untainted by the malignant rot.

We become too afraid to be!

Too afraid to observe or even contemplate the irony and contradiction and the unthinking, unquestioning mindlessness that we’ve been convinced is the only way for us to be within the fragmented collective of our species-defined humanity.

Inside these four walls I am forced to befriend my demons even after they have been gauging deep scars in my flesh; I have to rip the scabs of fear from all of the wounds that have never healed.

My dignity pillaged; humiliated; denied my physical freedom; prodded and probed and dissected; stripped of my humanity I am finally able to observe through an untainted, pristine lens: finally I am the observer I have always aspired to be, and I have no camera.
(From A TALE OF EXTRA ORDINARY MADNESS)