What do you see in the mirror that is this aphorism?
When we gaze into the infinite;
do we seek the unfathomable,
or just a familiar face?
It is a quiet narcissism.
This human habit of shrinking the boundless,
down into a boundary we can bear.
We take our deepest deficits;
our rawest, unhealed hollows,
and we cast them upward.
Hoping they will be handed back to us,
haloed and whole.
This is not a denial of the divine.
It makes no claim on the territory of the sacred;
whether it breathes in the cosmos,
or sits in the silence of the void.
It is, instead, an inquisition of our maps.
A gentle probe of our own presumptions.
Whatever deity we claim;
whatever ultimate truth we tether our tongues to...
how much of it is the truth,
and how much is just the echo of our own ache?
If the supreme architect we envision,
builds only the exact walls we wish to hide behind...
are we worshiping the architect?
Or are we worshiping the walls?
The aphorism is a prism.
It asks us to pause before we pronounce.
To realize that our highest certainty,
is often just our deepest craving,
caught in a clever disguise.
Can we ever shed the filter of our own gaze onto the divine?
To shed the filter entirely;
is to ask the eye to see without a retina.
We are made of lenses.
Bound by the biology of our longing;
tethered to the grammar of our grief.
Perhaps the goal is not to shatter the mirror;
for without the glass, the finite mind cannot capture the light at all.
But we can polish the reflection.
We can become brutally aware of our own reflections.
When we stop demanding the canyon echo our names;
when we stop requiring the cosmos to carry a grand, fathomable plan;
we make room for the silence.
In that raw, unfiltered moment;
where we simply exist without a narrative;
the glass thins.
It is in the acceptance of the absurdity;
the surrender to the immediate now;
that we get the closest to the territory.
Not by drawing a better map;
but by setting the pen down entirely.
