'neath the stars

"I saw then that my sense of me being me was exactly the same thing as my sensation of being one with the whole cosmos. I did not need to have some sort of different, odd kind of experience to feel in total connection with everything. Once you get the clue you see that the sense of unity is inseparable from the sense of difference. You would not know yourself, or what you meant by self, unless at the same time you had the feeling of other.
Now the secret is that the other eventually turns out to be you. The element of surprise in life is when suddenly you find the thing most alien turns out to be yourself. Go out at night and look at the stars and realize that they are millions and billions of miles away, vast conflagrations far out in space. You can lie back and look at that and say "Well, surely I hardly matter. I am just a tiny little speck aboard this weird spotted bit of dust called earth....

this guy knows what we're talking about

..and all that was going on out there billions of years before I was born and will still be going on billions of years after I die." Nothing seems stranger to you than that, or more different from you, yet there comes a point, if you watch long enough, when you will say "Why that's me!" It is the other that is the condition of your being yourself, as the back is the condition of being the front, and when you know that, you will never die."
-Alan Watts, Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life

why not change our names? some things we won't recognize . .
some will remain the same
some people roll a stone . .
find out they were never really even in their home

underneath the stars there are a million ways to be the way you are . .
all of them dying
underneath the rays there'll be a million ways to live the days ahead . .
why are we crying?

there were words . . on my skin . .
you touched them & they woke again . . now they're on the wind . .
-railroad earth, 'neath the stars

and yet...sometimes? ...you can still find yourself completely disconnected and completely, completely alone, in the most beautiful sense.