Dear office dweller
You may have noticed a peaceful patch of distant blue through the window, or a tiny triangle of light that managed to sneak into the upper right corner of the stationary cupboard, or a strange instant of peace just as your hand reached down for a door knob, or the warmth that a mailed message of beauty spread through your cramped legs, or the lovely colours that Susan from finance has chosen to wear today, or the wonderful clarity of the sunshine after you turn away from your computer screen, or a ghastly yet quite unexpectedly interesting quirk you notice about some stiff ’s facial geography, or a completely unprofessional moment of honesty that, for a split-second, nobody knows how to react to, or the pangolin in the canteen, or a sudden realisation — a thought that is pristinely there before you — of being immeasurably powerful and calm and above all this nonsense?
Well that was me.
I just dropped by to say hello. All my love,
Freedom.
x
Dear city dweller
Me again. Do you remember when you placed your cheek against the warm bristly flanks of a living cow? Do you remember when you dressed up as an bunny and performed a play for your friends on a makeshift stage built in the woods? Do you remember when you sat under an upside down tea-tree, drying out in the attic, twirling slowly above you and throwing its orbiting fractal shadow over the candle-lit ceiling? Do you remember when you made elderberry champagne from the berries that grew beneath your window? Do you remember when you rested naked on your spade, muscles singing, and then showered under the warm water of the watering hose? Do you remember when you sat having a shit on the side of a wide empty hill, and the donkey, which you hadn’t fed yet, came up and nodded its head, oddly huge, against you? Do you remember noticing how the wild flowers came in waves as the seasons passed? Do you remember walking back from the well at the end of the day, swinging your buckets in big loping arcs as liquid golden light fringed the grass? Do you remember how surprised you were when you first ate a minute-old pea or a wild raspberry? Do you remember seeing your lover sitting on the roof in the melancholy moonlight, so perfectly clear, and strange? Do you remember watching a clear stream breaking on mountain rocks, feeling your heart stirring in glad satisfaction at being, ‘ah yes,’ at home?
Please come back,
Freedom.
x
Dear home dweller
While trapped in your living unit, staring at your screen for six, eight, twelve hours a day, using it to consume culture, society, education, health and all meaning, you might have thought it a good idea to get seven or eight black musicians together to practice funk, reggae and soul classics such as Otis’ Redding’s cover of Try a Little Tenderness or The Flirtations’ Nothing But A Heartache; and then tour the town centres of the country with it? It’s possible that you wanted to tell the truth to everyone you know, the truth of who they are, and what this world is? Or perhaps you’ve just felt like crying for a week, not personal tears of self-pity, but pure purging tears for the condition of creatures in existence? Or you might have wanted to set fire to your house, or make wild love with a stranger in the road outside, or throw cooked vegetables over your garden fence, or write hand-written letters of intense self-revelation and post them into random houses down your street? Your may have felt the rending urge to smash the whole thing up, inject a crippling virus into the system or run out into the street naked singing the theme to The Avengers? Or maybe you’ve dallied with the idea of going totally God Mad and worshipping every single moment in your life as if it were a sacred gift from the infinite? Death-mania is possible, a desire to change everything about your life and an unignorable desire to melt, break, shatter your self, tear it open and be empty of all becoming.
I keep trying to contact you, but you don’t respond. Let me know when you want me back in your life,
Freedom