As I stepped out of the studio and onto the path toward the house, I noticed that the honeysuckle had grown or something, maybe bent over from the heavy rain, but anyway, it was in my way. I had to step a half step to the right. I took another step and thought that I should come back and trim the bush back, maybe with a chain saw and cut it all the way back so I could finish that small deck and roof I have wanted to do for decades. Then, as I often do, I thought about what I was saying from the standpoint of the object in discussion, in this case the right of a plant to live in such a way that I had to take a step to the right, instead of merely remembering where the plant was, what it had looked like the first time I passed it. No, I thought about whacking a living thing so I wouldn't have to step sideways. Why there are people who pay money to go somewhere and step sideways while some excitable person plays loud music. Just amazing.

Anyway I was thinking about this concept of feeling like I had a "space" that I had to defend, even to a point where I would kill something in that space without my permission, or something. Although there are plenty of other animals who also seem to feel that way, starting at least with that white faced hornet growing a tribe in my lawn tractor. He loves his space. So I flexed my shoulders and thought about that space. I always think of my friend when I start flexing and thinking about my "body space" because he is so aware of his most of the time. He tries a lot to be aware of himself because he almost lost himself once or twice. Anyway, of course in defining one's "self" as selft you always have to deal with and define the limits at which point you are a finer "you" than this body is, was or maybe is soon not to be. Why do I "need" so much buffer room?

I got to thinking about something I see a lot of lately, mud, and all the things living in it, in a different space. Like the earthworm living in it's tube while being themselves something of a tube, as we learned in high school biology class. I think that with biology should be a smattering of spirituality. If, for instance, I had at least listened to someone read about that great story where the mystic shows the god a line of ants and reveals that each ant had been a god at one time, well maybe disecting that worm could have been a spiritual journey. There's a segment of a show I saw once where the young medical students are being introduced to their cadavers, being told something about them and a small lecture is made about respecting the dead forms. Well, it would have been nice to have the same lecture for the worms and frogs. They all have spirits and deserve respect and there I was getting ready to set back a living form to control a space I can't control anyway.

Think about that worm space, Many of us must have dug tunnels or played in the sand so the idea of soil on arm is not a bad feeling. Now expand that sense to where you draw up your consciousness into that long, thin form down under the soil and it's all your form. That's you moving blindly about sniffing. When you find something that smells good you open your mouth and dig into it, swallowing, digesting, modifying, transfering out wastes and expelling. You leave behind an imprint from the inside of your passage. How many times do I feel that I am leaving an impact of my passage? Being an artist it's easier to leave stuff, but if I look at the stuff...

I read so many times about Egyptians saving up fingernails, hair and such so in the afterlife all your parts would stull be there or something, as if cast off parts are something you'd ned when you had transcended form? They apparently didn't think highly of the idea of transcending form. Odd, because the butterfly certainly understands it. We all deal with the idea of a agg hatching into a worm which becomes a catterpiller and that turns into a cocoon or crysalis which then splits and turns into a big winged thingy that lays eggs. Yeah, it's a great story and analogy, but if you treat it as a template and extend the metaphor or something, then we think about that honeysuckle and that space not being mine to control, I sure don't control the space that I normally think of as me very well. It hurts, and I don't want it to hurt. And it didn't used to. Like the egg thing may have hurt like hell so many times along the way as it became a winged thingy, which then did something else. It stopped flying and fell apart, becoming soil, dust, that sort of thing, scattering out into the environment. The assumed form becomes quite large that way and just as tenuous as the form I had back in 1974. It didn't hurt and it didn't last. So if I had all my body parts saved in jars, maybe I'd have some back parts that could plug in, that'd be great.

Actually, an earthworm has no backbone to hurt. Although getting stepped on has to be real tough, even underground. Great apes dent the earth. But ordinarily I bet the thing is, just keep digging and sniffing. Eventually they must from time to time dug up to a dead earthworm, maybe torn by a shovel or something. I don't know what they do when they run nose first into dead Roy, do they pause and give some thought to "It could well be me." or by eating dead Roy, shoving him into their tube allow Roy to become, for a time, them. Do they eat crying over some wormy memory? Most would say no, but that is specieism or something because we have no way of knowing, without becoming worm bait ourselves. Which most of us will do, even if the bait is deferred by way of the crematorium. Or sent to a hospital, as my dad wants to do. Bravo, dad.

I have been told that my son cannot donate his body very easily in terms of organs and all. Except as a package to a medical school where someone can learn something from that form which once I assumed was him. I'm not so sure any more, in no small part because I am not exactly sure how I became that which I do not recall advocating for. I would have liked a lot more warranty on the back thingy, but then, interestingly enough, in terms of population the beings most impacted by sudden changes like death are bacteria. Which live in me and are always trying to eat me. Like little worms or tube thingys, eating me from the inside. Or if you like merely trying to get me to become them for a time. They may see this as a form of greeting. They have to be fatalists because if I ever do answer back it often takes the form of dietary changes to elimintae most of them, another genocide to my credit. But life goes on, changeing form as life does.

We got all these tubes running in all directions causing changes of forms which could all boil down to a confusion over the difference between "Eat me!" and "Hello!"

As I type I drink water from some unknown source filled with life forms becoming me or as much of me as I can normally see. Curious criteria for what I consider "me". I mean by and large the part of me that I can't see that mutters in the dark and plans things and projects itself through time and space, well that me I can never see. So just because I can't see it doesn't mean it isn't me. And since most of the universe as I am willing to conceed exists can't be seen, then there exists such a very good potential for my being infinite that by and large this should make my back feel beter. I keep asking myself is any of this going to stop the pain in the back which for some reason I seem to having a difficulty today. With.

Maybe it's trying to say hello, like a toddler fumbling it's first words. Maybe my form is stumbling toward a greeting. Well, trust me to misunderstand something like that. We must go through our entire lives screening calls we never knew we got. Like filters on an email program we don't know what we lose. Lately gnats have been buzzing around and now and then one flies into my ear. It sounds a bit like feedback from a microphone but maybe the guy is simply apologizing for his friends bumping into me like that. Maybe he was listening to his echo.

Maybe when I sleep my consciousness seeps through into the bed like water draining out of a strainer of sushi rice. Like a "sea in a bottle" my mind sloshes back and forth. It may seem calm to those watching but to one inside it might feel sometimes like a tempest. Wow. A tempest in a teapot would still seem a tempest to a bacteria, I'll wager. On his way to becoming me.