On sneezes, significance, and the savage masterpiece of being alive
The morning purge
8:07 am, and I’ve just decided to commit to 30 minutes a morning of writing, to be done after I feed the furry and fish family. Random notes to self, nonsense, dreams that happened and other droppings.
Lately I have a lot of these streaming through me, mostly when I ride my scooter. I start hearing spoken word and broken metaphors that my thought-scape persists in collaging together to make sense of the purge of life.
Life sometimes feels like that. Like a purge of savage, not quite digested ingredients, vomited onto an ongoing canvas of hardened historical bile and substance. Like a mess. A total chaotic mess. Other times, like a divinely orchestrated genial masterpiece.
Maybe it’s both, and both need to exist simultaneously to organize themselves into iterative progress and unfathomable beauty.
A lot of masterpieces that come into existence need the purge of chaos and savagery at some point of their creation. The creation of mountains, for many, would not be a pleasant or pretty process, but in the end their existence takes the breath away of those who get to be in their presence.
33km Per Hour
The other day when I was driving on my scooter in the traffic battle of Ubud, the same day that I realized my ideal kilometer speed of joy is 33km per hour, I was on a usual existential doom spiral. A common unwanted pen pal as of late.
And then an image was magnified for me to see. Like a telescopic macro lens that zoomed in from outer space and showed me an ant sneezing.
My life was the sneeze itself.
A tiny cluster of carbon, dust, mucous particles and other unknown compounds that the ant needed to expel from its system. Zoomed out, the sneeze was un-seeable. Totally insignificant. Zoomed in, my force shook the ant, sprayed on a nearby leaf, and gave the ant great relief – possibly saving it from some foreign matters that could disrupt its system.
I don’t know if ants sneeze at all. But the message of the illustration was converted clearly.
The Sensational Wonder Of The Sneeze
I’m as insignificant as a sneeze. And as short lived.
It’s not often that in a recollection of “the best of 2020” – or any year – a sneeze would make it to the showreel. And simultaneously, sneezes are a sensational and experiential wonder of the world. An eruptuous, majestic event that wipes out the territory and changes the internal atmosphere, for the better. And then they are forgotten.
In the moment pre, during and directly post sneeze – the sensations that collide overtake the sneezer. It can be all that can exist in that slice of time, as they demand the full recruitment of an entire mind-body-presence to express. A sneeze temporarily stops all thought and possesses the sneezer in its orgasmic hold.
A sneeze can change your entire day, although it doesn’t demand the recognition of having done so.
The Remedy To The Crisis
My doom spiral that day was about purpose and value in this life. The internal grips of invasive dialogues and dismantling emotional erosions were in the midst of dissolving me, when my mind flashed and zoomed in to this single tiny ant sneezing, embedded so deeply in the foliage of nature that even nature itself didn’t notice it fully until it shook the mycelium with its sneeze.
And this was the horrifying and humbling remedy to my crisis of existence, as I was attempting to maintain 33km per hour to protect my scooter joy ride.
To somehow accept the unnoticeable-ness of it – of a single life – and to simultaneously see and acknowledge the ground-shaking, momentous importance of the expression we are here for.
The Legacy of Mucous
That one sneeze sent a ripple of relief and telepathic reassurance to the ant colony. It caused a tremble so big on the tiny leaf where the ant was standing that the roots and branches felt the massage of it.
And then it was over.
And its mucousy legacy got devoured by some other hungry celled organisms on standby. Pooped back out, and reconstructed into a different art piece of nature’s endless divinely orchestrated, savage and chaotic masterpieces.
Loving every flicker of you,
Meghan