For the stars

Sometimes you just have to try.

Tuesday morning and the eyes of a restless internet turn to me. Did you know that everything in the world is equally tiny and magnificent? These words you are reading are lost in the greatest sea of text ever created, a vast, unfathomable ocean. Everything is meaningless, unaccountable, unreal, repetitive, and swallowed up by the heaving oceanic movements of time and the wild cacophony of a billion voices that flatten everything.

And yet here we are. With these words flooding our heads. Our very reality is all caught up in this, vision, this crystallization of letters. For myself I am unaccountably trying to share some dream, some sense of some mystery always clawing up from the great underneath. The skin of the world itself can fall into doubt, but there is always an underneath. Even the most homely writer rides that. I ride that, trying to direct some primordial, unfathomable, and bottomless force into slender words, and catch a terrible fragment at best.

And what are you doing here? 

The same. You are here for the same. 

And how can I say what you are here for? Well, I have always been prone to fits of wild confidence. Here is one now. We are wrangling volcanoes. We are volcano wranglers. We bring up the burning lava, the molten rock. We guide it as best we can, but bringing it up from the great underneath is the key thing. The lava hardens in the cool air and the light of day. It turns to stone and stone rises from the ocean, rises from itself, and we stand higher and higher. It is a slow and wild, glorious and terrifying endeavor, maybe hopeless too. But for all our vast tricks and talents, we are only earthbound creatures. It is the only way we have to reach the stars.