Here is an article in response to Put this in Your Pipe and Smoke It
Onward Through the Fog
At any given moment, across the surface of this turning planet, human beings are inhabiting every possible condition of existence.
Someone is delirious with fever.
Someone is kneeling in prayer.
Someone is drunk in a bar at noon.
Someone else is counting breaths in disciplined silence.
A child is starving.
A trader is celebrating abundance beyond measure.
A nurse is holding a hand in the dark.
A tyrant is making a speech.
A poet is revising a line.
A young couple is falling in love.
A grieving parent is learning how to breathe again.
All of it happening simultaneously.
Humanity, taken as a whole, is not one thing. It is not wise or foolish, enlightened or lost. It is a vast simultaneity of states: delusion and clarity, cruelty and tenderness, addiction and sobriety, arrogance and humility, despair and elation. If one were able to step back far enough - beyond nation, beyond era, beyond ideology - one would see an astonishing field of variation. Not a single story, but a thousand billion stories unfolding at once.
This diversity is not an error in the system. It is the system.
The universe does not express itself in monotone. It speaks in weather patterns, tectonic shifts, coral reefs, supernovas, bacteria, oak trees, and thinking creatures who argue about the meaning of it all. In us, the universe experiences hunger and abundance, rage and mercy, boredom and revelation. The spectrum is wide because the experiment is wide.
If nothing else can be said about the human condition, it can be said that it is inexhaustibly diverse.
That fact alone is a kind of wonder.
The trouble begins when we imagine that our own local state - our despair, our ideology, our tribe’s triumph, our private wound - is the whole of reality. It never is. We are one note in a vast and ongoing chord. Necessary, perhaps, but never the entire score.
The invitation, if there is one, is not to control the symphony. It is to awaken within it.
To recognize that the very capacity to witness this complexity - to stand in awareness of the contradictions and still remain curious - is itself extraordinary. We are not only participants in the human drama. We are conscious of participating. The universe, through us, can reflect on itself.
That recognition does not instantly cure poverty, addiction, violence, or despair. It does not bypass suffering. But it shifts the posture from contraction to participation. From isolation to belonging. From the illusion that everything rests on our private narrative to the more spacious understanding that we are part of something unfolding far beyond our individual timelines.
Our bodies already know this. They breathe without consulting ideology. They heal cuts without asking permission. They regulate, adapt, and recalibrate with quiet intelligence. Identity is slower. It clings. It fears dissolution. It wants to be the conductor rather than the instrument.
Perhaps awakening is simply allowing identity to follow the deeper intelligence that is already at work.
When enough individuals inhabit that posture - not perfection, not sainthood, but simple awareness and participation - something stabilizes in the collective field. The fog does not disappear overnight. It thins. The music becomes slightly more coherent. We begin to play in better time with one another.
But we should not hold our breath waiting for some grand global enlightenment event. These processes unfold with geological patience. Tolerance matters. Time matters. Even confusion has its role in the larger movement.
Each of us has a part.
Some will carry grief.
Some will build.
Some will question.
Some will heal.
Some will fail spectacularly and teach others what not to repeat.
The task is not to become everything. It is to inhabit whi and what we are with clarity and sincerity.
So we proceed.
Through misunderstanding.
Through beauty.
Through contradiction.
Through fog.
Onward.
Not only are many things happening at once in the world and universe....but within our own selves. We may be going through multiple things simultaneously and if you go deeper, within our bodies by their own ways, blood flows, cells multiply, an ache here and there, an itch, the beginnings of sickness, a cure of something else etc. We can teach ourselves to respond to any one thing or even react if something happens suddenly. Often there's choices, sometimes there isn't. And then.....there's going into the studio and see/feel what we want/need to do.....it has its own healing powers.