If they could they would be with us. The dead. The lovers that have passed along. A lover may still be pining for you up in heaven, or whatever you want to call it. The after *this* (gestures to the would around us).
{audioforchapter.haroldbudd.littleheart.streaming}
Ah, music, time, reading. Take a deep breath.
We’re here. The music will allow your mind to better drift. I want you to drift into this moment with me. Reading. Typing. Together.
Reading. Typing. Together.
Slow down. Let’s take this simply. See if we can keep in layman’s English for this one.
Music, like the song your are listening to (and I am listening to as I write this) can transport us across space and time. If you are with me, reading, listening, vibing, we are actually, cosmically, together, entwined (def: how love threads become enflamed and wrapped together in the presence of big love) we call it now.
Hear the piano. Take a deep breath and hold it. Listen. Release. Let go. Read. Keep reading, that’s the only part you have to do… (chuckles) I mean, that’s the point.
Facts: when you are reading my words I am spiritually beside you. It’s how the comms and time mashine stuff works here. I am typing, you are reading, that feedback loop creates a connection between us across time and space. A singular thread between you and me. You reading. Listening. Me. Writing. Listening.
See?
We are doing the same thing. My thoughts are in your mind. As they are in mine.
And in some sci-fiey way, it is actually happening at the exact same moment in time. Everything is. A loop. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. I get sloppy with my writing when I let the excitement take over. Slow. That message was for me too, btw.
Breathe in. Let go of your expectations of this book, this time, this music that’s playing. There just is this moment. Reading. Music playing. Perhaps a candle and nag champa burning nearby, out of frame. We are one in time. One time.
We are One.
God.
Breathe in.
Accept that all of this, everything you’ve known, loved or lost, is god. God. GOD.
You’re not going crazy, you’re feeling the reality of the moment. Here is the moment. This is it.
God is You and Me and Love and Music and Sex and Drugs and Sex and Man and Woman and Cat. Hold the next breath in for five seconds.
One. I type.
Two. You read.
Three. I
Four. Am.
God.
You are God.
The cat you loved. A sister that died. All of it.
One.
When you disolve you become one again. ONE. What memories of you remain, are those within your relatives and memories of those who knew you. And the creative works you left behind.
Type.
Read.
One.
God.
I feel like I’m trying to do this with Morse code. I’m not getting it right. We’re not getting it right.
I’ll try again.
You are reading at some point during your human life. I am writing from mine. What is mindblowing is this: time is made up, a metaphor not a linear route as we’ve been told up until now. Time does not exist. Space is a bit more tricky.
It might be time for me to rest. I’m a little more tired these days. Happy to be tired. Happy with so much in my life. Watching and celebrating the changes, and knowing where I can push and where I have to release. I’m releasing this chapter and it’s woo woo spiritual message to my sister Sidney. (she giggles) And she is here too.
{wave of warm loving vibrations}
That was spectacular. Wow. I even surprised myself at how well that worked. See, by playing with your focus setting, I was able to both participate, anticipate, and work on other things at the exact instant you begin reading these words.
Then it’s like a mystical warmth, a web, as if the moment just went from mono-to-stereo.
I am going for a magic trick here. As I understand more about this moment than I can capture for you. My son is slamming around in the kitchen for food <shift to real-time mode> he is here, my son asking in an obscure way if I had any ideas about ordering food, and the smallest amount, and…<break>. He’s back on his own timeline. (Everyone chuckles.) I am back to writing this…
As the music swirls in unfamilar ways and blends of sounds melt-warping my present grip on reality, as writing, reading, listening, god, time, space, love, everything, was here in these key strokes. {can you hear that? what he’s doing with the sounds?}
I have many choices at this point.
We have experienced something. I don’t know how to name it yet. Okay, I experienced it. I hope for you that it was a pleasant as it was for me. Warpy and drippy, like the music I asked to be played as the soundtrack to bond us in time and space.
Love. I said I would get back to it, right?
Okay, here’s the bomb: Love is the energy that moves everything in the universe. More powerful than gravity, love, or the red thread, is analogous to red stone in Minecraft ™.
Love is the energy of the universe. Today, Kim Possible, tennis, smiles, sun, amazing weather, bliss, god, you reading, me typing, her, smiling.
See that. All of that. Swirling mess of letters and names and ideas. That is love, baby.
Love is a mess.
Either you have it or you don’t. You can’t buy it. That’s sex. Big difference between the two. (To be covered later.) Sex you can buy. Love is the missing element on the periodic table. Love is like that. Why you are reading this. Love. Why I am writing. Why I continue writing. Can’t stop.
Love.
(smile) And that, is the magic.
That smile ^^ up there. I’ve been waiting to show you this for a while now. That smile in parenthesis, that is my SISTER:ONE. The thread my favorite sister embodied while we shared our human lifetimes. She is here. She is reading. We are ONE.
ONE.
Again, it’s GOD.
Right?
Any more clear?
*looks at Sidney’s monoprint on the wall
Any more, dear?
(blows a kiss)
And we’re done. You got it, right?
That was her. Me. You. And God.
By reading this you are doing something with me. Time and space don’t have the way you have been taught. If you skipped around in the book, and you’ve arrived at this moment without a clear understanding of what’s going one, good, that’s the point. And welcome.
God. Sidney. Harold Budd. John. Reader.
Please take a bow. This afternoon’s matinee has been sponsored by lifeline mints and poems, the only mint with a poem inside
That. ^^ The last little bit. “lifeline mints and poems”.
Vonnegut. (er, hmm) Same.
{even as the jazz music and love continued to flow, this moment’s author is going offline for a bit to dream in another color and cosmos, please return at a later time, we commence broadcasting again at 9 am. thank you again for reading.}
This tradition is often called sumi-e: fewer marks, heavier meaning. The brush is not correcting itself; it is committing.
Key qualities to notice
-
Ma (negative space): the white is not background, it is breath.
-
Gesture over detail: a single stroke can hold a mountain, a thought, a lifetime.
-
Ink density: dry scratches whisper; saturated blacks announce.
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Asymmetry: balance arrives late, sideways, on purpose.
If you want to generate or paint one
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Limit yourself to one brush and one pass.
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Start with water before ink, let chance lead.
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Think of the stroke as a record of time, not an object.
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Stop early. The painting ends when the mind tries to improve it.
There is a spiritual *now* between us.
return to index ∀ | this is a chapter of a novel** in progress:
