Some Find

Listen to a reading of “Some Find”:

Some find it easier to die than to go on living.

Some find it easier to avoid looking at death than to ever truly live.

Some find it easier to turn their bodies into hardened weapons and go fight in a cage than to ever once be tender and kind to themselves.

Some find it easier to build multibillion-dollar corporate empires than to stop and take a single honest look within themselves.

Some find it easier to wage war than to wage peace, even though just below the surface every molecule of their being is calling out for peace like baby birds calling out for their mother.

Some find that what some find easy is actually a whole lot harder than simply being at ease.

Some find that the easiest way to live is to relinquish everything within themselves that thinks it knows how to live.

Some find that if you ask a psychedelic substance to show you what you need to see right before you take it, you’ll always get what you asked for but never what you expected.

Some find that enlightenment will cost you everything, but once you’ve paid you realize both “you” and “everything” were always made of pipe smoke and bedtime stories.

Some find the answers they were looking for, only to look at them later and discover they’re just off-brand actors pretending to be the answers they were looking for.

I never found what I was seeking, only that the instruments I was searching with were the things that tricked me into thinking there was something to search for. A compass made entirely out of magnets. A telescope made of desert mirages. Sonar made of siren’s songs.

I don’t have any answers, just this blank treasure map with a red ‘X’ crayoned on it and this baby stroller full of tears. My Jeopardy scoreboard reads minus infinity. My LinkedIn just says “I know two jokes.”

Some may find that trying to solve this mystery is like trying to catch fish with a net made of water. Like chasing your tail when you don’t even have one. Like cloning an army of yourself just because there’s nobody else to make war on, and giving the clones all your weapons before attacking them.

And some may find that the peace they are seeking hides right behind all their efforts to find it, like someone running around as fast as they can trying to catch up with something called rest. Like someone frantically pounding on the inside of their own front door begging to be let into their home. Like someone scanning the distant horizon day in and day out looking for their own eyeballs.

And some may find that the only reason the drums of war are beating so loudly is to drown out the noise of those baby birds peep-peep-peeping out to our hearts, like someone who keeps talking just to keep silence from crashing in. That we are in a punctured submarine trying to seal out all the water, and the submarine is violence, and the ocean is peace, and we lost this battle long before it started, long before anything started, because we cannot run from ourselves forever, because those baby birds keep calling us home, because our efforts to stave off the abyss of love we are surrounded by were doomed before we even built this vessel, because beauty is just a word for having truly seen something, because the problem with spiritual insights is that they too often give rise to spiritual beliefs, because anyone who thinks they’ve got this all figured out is suffering from a psychedelic drug deficiency, because we built this submarine out of NO and it’s being hopelessly flooded with an ocean of YES, big YES, intense YES, intimate YES, YES into even our biggest NO parts, YES into even the parts of ourselves we despise, YES into our guilt, YES into our shame, YES into our rejection of all the gifts we are swimming in because we cannot accept them because NO it can’t be that easy and NO I am not worthy and NO I deserve only crumbs and I must scrape and struggle and apologize to get them.

And some find themselves submerged in an ocean of YES, suddenly realizing all their beliefs have been lies.

Some find. Some seek. Some find their way out of seeking. Some find their way out of finding. The water is crashing in, and we’ve been waving that white flag since before the Big Bang.

Peep peep.

https://caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/some-find