Look for yourself in yesterdays footprints

The wind has erased your passing

Look for yourself in the thoughts that you had a year ago

You are not there

you barely remember what you had for breakfast last Tuesday

We wake, we think thoughts and we journey over the day

The hills, the valleys

Emotional highs

Emotional lows

And all the while the wind blows

Erasing

For what are we?

But stories that sing ourselves to sleep

Sing us into being

Day after day

Until the record stops

Needle acratching

And all that is left

Is what others say

About who we were

What we did

If they even recall

Indents disappearing

Over another sand hill

It’s difficult to believe, we once considered ourselves important

When anything we ever thought

Was just some made-up story

*I like peace. I hold peace highest, lean into it. So it annoys me greatly when I can’t sleep, because of some made up story that I am having about someone or some thing.

Drama that I know I am responsible for but cannot rid myself of the noise of telling.

And I finish with one story – finally. And another record drops and I’m off listening to some other tale about nothing.

In the moment the brain is heavily invested in whatever the current story is.

It’s coming up with plans and ideas and dozens of scenarios, that keep that train alive, hungry, eating up all my energy when I would prefer to be asleep.

The best use of my mind when it is doing this sort of thing is to telescope out. Watch myself. How do I get out of this mode? I wonder.

Listening helps. Not to the orator in my brain, but further out, I listen to the vehicles on the highway, the night bugs, the creaks and groans of the house as it relaxes into a temperature change.

I change the story to that of a walk in the bush. Touch the bark on trees, smell lemon-scented leaves as I crush them beneath my feet. I recall the sensation of bare feet on warm sand. The difference between the rich red loam of where I grew up, the heavy clod consistency of black soil where I live now, and the powder soft beach sand of holidays.

And then another record drops and I’m off worrying about something or planning something else.

My respite in peace has flown

Which is when I realise. That’s all there is to life – the stories we tell ourselves.

So we may as well tell ourselves good ones. It’s all fiction.

We are the narrator and therefore the creator of our lives.

The narrator is the creator.

The ego inflates our sense of worth, many things appear important that actually aren’t when you are thinking from a place that is ego centric.

It helps me enormously to realise my insignificance. That I’m just passing through. Temporary. Transient. As is everything that I treasure. I remind myself that I own nothing that one day won’t belong to someone else or be on a dump somewhere. That no one is thinking of me right now, they are either asleep or busy with their own concerns.

The less I matter, the happier I become. Matter is weight, it drags us down. Stop dressing this mannequin with the Emporers new clothes – let them drop. The farce is real, the story is not.

Header photo: wildflowers across the dash of my brothers old farm vehicle. Taken out west on the family property where we grew up as kids. It was a beautiful season, and I went home to see the flowers in bloom. A lovely memory.