But we love the drag, we love the human costume. We think it’s the peak physical experience, s**t, we think it’s the peak experience experience. We think it’s what we are.
We fall into our characters, costumes and roles so deeply that we get stuck in them.
We make internet bios and wikipedia pages dedicated to our characters. “Chris does this, is this, doesn’t do this, loves this, hates this, has these traumas, is this productive, has these routines…”
Our battle for liberation on this physical plane is in our obsession with trying to be solid when in fact we are mush. We try and become secure in our characters, in the performance of “me” by any means necessary. But we are not these fixed beings, we’re not a box or category that we try and fit ourselves into. We’re just giant balls of mush.
Formless and expansive, capable of much more than we can even convince of. Mush - one moment this and the next moment that. Much more spacious than any label or instagram bio can ever contain.
Physics says that you can never actually touch anything. What!? If you're reading this right now, it's a sure bet that you’re touching something, your cellphone, laptop, chair, desk, a nice plush bed with high thread count (we can dream, right?) - but you aren't actually touching it.
Everything you can see, touch, and "feel" is made up of infinitesimally small parts of matter. Even objects that appear to be stationary (including you) are in fact vibrating mush. Oscillating and resonating, billions of particles vibrating so fast we think we’re one solid thing, but we’re not. Microscopically, all sorts of strange things are going on within us that aren't perceivable to the human eye…
We aren’t meant to be this solid, composed, single fixed identity, feeling and mindset thing - we are mush, we are gods in drag - so much more than any one thing we tell ourselves we are. We can feel so much more, love so much more, have so much more gratitude.
But it’s hard to be mush, hard to be this vibrating full of potential thing, the character feels a lot safer, I’ve rehearsed it a lot more.
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I think liberation lies in the mush, the place beyond the story about who we are, and what we are, and what we should be or do. In order to find this place, Zen practitioners will use the famous koan, “What is your original face?”
It is a koan (a paradoxical anecdote or riddle, used in Zen Buddhism to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment) used to drop the stories and structures we believe as “self” and enter into a connection with ultimate existence.
In her 1974 essay 'Seeing,’ Annie Dillard writes about the experiences of a group of people blind from birth who recovered their sight after cataract operations in the nineteenth century. Their brains hadn't ever learned how to make sense of visual information and so for a time they saw the world unprocessed and unsorted. They saw mush - a depthless dazzle of color patches, some bright and some so black they looked like holes. Trees glowed like flames. And each person had a wildly unique face.
If only someone had given them brushes, Dillard writes, “then maybe we all could see color-patches too, the world unraveled from reason.” The world as expansive mush.
xo
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