text: It’s happened before. At least I think it has happened before. I have a memory. I am a memory. There is no confusion. There isn’t enough of anything for there to be confusion. I am small. I am inconsequential. A mote of dust propelled hither and thither by forces beyond my understanding. The winds of change swept into my life. I was not ready. I am never ready. I will never be ready. The whirlwind of my emotions calms for a moment, allowing me a rare moment of clarity. This is necessary. I am free. Free from my ego. Free from the arrogance of my self-pitying introspection. There is more to this life than my worried thoughts. There is more to this world. To this universe. I am nothing, and yet I am everything. The wind came and it transformed me. As it took from me I panicked and I clung on to what it was so intent on removing. Locked in a struggle that would only ever end one way. Pain. I wept as I lost what I thought had value. I watched as it was stolen from me and faded into the insignificance from whence it came. I mistakenly thought that that was also my fate. I wailed and screamed in my nakedness. Afraid to be so exposed. I thought myself vulnerable. I was wrong. We are vulnerable in our desperation. A desperation evidenced by how we cling onto the material. We are possessed by our possessions. They poison us with a drug that gives us the illusion of happiness, but is anything but happiness. In the falsehood of realities, that are all about taking and never about giving, we seek to possess others. And in that ownership we hurt and twist those around us so that they better fit the distorted expectations we have of how everyone should be. Again and again, in our bold ignorance we attempt to emulate gods. Moulding people into our muddle-headed perception of perfection. The gods do not deign to do this. The gods are not so presumptuous and craven. They gave us free will so that they could delight in our unfurling into the beautiful forms that we were always meant to be. Instead they witness our depravity and corruption and they lament our foolhardy ignorance, fighting to stay hands that would readily end so much sacrilege and heresy. The wind came for me and I fought it. I thought it had come to take everything that I was, but it was only here to free me from the prison that I had built around myself in my state of fearful denial. A state I thought was living, but was only ever existing in exile. The winds came, and they came only for me. Alone and in misery, I felt them embrace me and I despaired. If the winds had been me, they would have given up there and then. They would have reacted mindlessly and withdrawn. Thankfully, the winds were not me. Not as I was. Now they are. Swept adrift in the endless oceans of the universe, I closed my eyes and waited for the storm to pass. In stubborn return, the storm waited for my ignorance to pass. The storm is ageless. Waiting is what it does. Patience is what it is about. In the end, I opened my eyes. I had to open my eyes. Cautiously, I brought my surroundings into view. Flinching reactively at the prospect of the suffering of my imagination being made real. The least that I deserved in my self-tortured state. I scanned the world through a jaundiced filter and yet I did not find what I was looking for. The source of my pain and anguish was not out there. It took me an age to accept that I was the source of my own pain. Even then I tarried. Even then I delayed the inevitable with an unsubstantiated reluctance. Fear born of ignorance and growing all the time. For all the things I held dear, it was my fear that I held most dearly. The realisation of this, my folly, shamed me. But then I understood that it always had. Shame was the lock on my chains. Yet what did I have to be ashamed of and what did I have to lose? This was not the question. Always I asked the wrong questions so that I never had to look at myself face to face. It was what I had to gain that mattered. Me, that was what I had to gain. Me and a life well lived. I thought that required courage, but that was another glib, self-generated lie. I was born to be me and I was made to live. Somehow, I had allowed my ego to blunder around corrupting my true nature, and now the winds had come to blow the veil of my deceit and denial to one side and expose the lie that I had become. As the last vestiges of the lies I had shrouded myself in during my living death fell away in the slipstream of my wind-born flight. I felt the dread weight of false sorrow lifting away from me and it was then that I soared. I soared upwards into the light, and for the first time since my childhood, I truly revelled in the joy of my life. I found happiness in my being. I re-joined the path and began the journey I was always meant to embark upon. I remembered my destiny as I looked upon my fate. The loss that had wrapped itself around me, squeezing the very life out of me was the loss of me. I had lost my way. The winds came and they freed me. They took everything from me, but that everything was nothing. After all, it meant nothing. I had been smothered under a blanket of darkness that held no meaning and no value for me. Now? Now I was lighter than a feather and cast adrift in the universe. The prospect of this was once terrifying to me, but now I knew. Now I had the necessary perspective and I could see at last. I am the universe, and the universe is me. My fear was illusory and it blinded me to myself and my true nature. Now I relaxed into the wind’s embrace and went where I was always meant to go and lived how I was always supposed to live. Somewhere, in a faraway place that I still owned, but that might not be me, I hoped that this time I would make it stick. That this time I would stay on the path and would not succumb to the seduction of the bright lights of a place that smells so badly wrong, but that whispers sweet falsehoods about it being so right. I hope I don’t give up. Not again. Not this time. A cycle of loss and redemption beckons once again, but I do not see it for what it is. I never see it for what it is. The wind sighs as my head is turned yet again.