jenng3

It's such an enormous thing to walk and to listen....I swear i more than half believe it when i say that somewhere love and justice shine, cynicism falls asleep, sappy slogans all come true, we forget to feed our fear.

There is a secret world concealed within this one.



You can taste it in the shock and roar of a first, unexpected kiss, or in the blood in your mouth that instant after an accident when you realize you're still alive. It blows in the wind you feel on the rooftops of a really reckless night of adventure. You hear it in the magic of your favorite songs, how they lift and transport you in ways no science or psychology could ever account for. Perhaps you've seen evidence of it scratched into bathroom walls in a code for which you had no key, or you've been able to make out a pale reflection of it in the movies that are supposed to keep us entertained. It's between the words when we speak of our desires and aspirations, still lurking somewhere beneath the limitations of what we feel to be possible and permissible.



When poets and radicals stay up until sunrise wracking their brains for the perfect sequence of words or deeds to fill hearts or cities with fire, they're trying to find a hidden entrance to it. When children escape out the window to go wandering late at night or freedom fighters search for a weakness in government fortifications, they're trying to steal into it--for they know better than the rest of us where the doors are hidden. When teenagers vandalize a billboard to provoke all-night chases with the police or anarchists interrupt an orderly demonstration to smash the windows of an army recruiting center, they're trying to storm its gates. When you're making love and you discover a new sensation or region of your lover's body, and the two of you feel like explorers discovering a desert oasis or the coast of an unknown continent--as if you are the first ones to reach the north pole or land on the moon--you are charting its frontiers.



Some find it in the sensation of danger: the feeling that, for one moment that seems to eclipse the past and future, something real is at stake. For others, it is a place of safety and sanctuary in a world of thoughtless brutality and destruction.



Maybe you stumbled into it by accident, once, amazed at what you found. The old world splintered behind and inside you, and no physician or metaphysician could ever put it back together again. Everything before became trivial, irrelevant, ridiculous as the horizons suddenly telescoped out around you and undreamt-of new paths offered themselves. And perhaps you swore that you would never return from whence you'd come, that you would live out the rest of your life electrified by that urgency, that thrill of discovery and transformation--but return you did.



Common sense dictates that this world can only be experienced temporarily, that it is just the shock of transition and nothing more; but the myths we share around our fires tell a different story: we hear of women and men who stayed there for weeks, years, who never returned, who lived and died there as heroes. We know, because we feel it in that atavistic chamber of our hearts that holds the memory of freedom from a time before time, that this secret world is near, waiting for us. You can see it in the flash in our eyes, in the abandon of our dances and love affairs, in the protest or party that gets out of hand.



You are not the only one trying to find it. We're out here, too---some of us are even waiting ahead there for you. Please know that anything you've ever done or considered doing to get there is not crazy, but beautiful, noble, necessary.



When we talk about revolution, the idea is that we could enter that secret world and never return---or that we could burn away this one, to reveal the one beneath it entirely.