The Meditation of Sensation Brings Many Things

It’s a strange land to be a stranger in. You wander in, wonder, then it hits you. This place doesn’t fit you, you’re an eagle in a whole other zoo, it’s not like you’re used to, might as well be Katmandu, but you find a clue and use the straps of your shoe to pull yourself up. Help yourself up to a wealth of experience, evidence of a delirious luxuriance of unheard of participance, the morning dew of a brand new renewed, refreshed test of the everyday. Every path a new way. Everybody’s got something to say. No more old dues to pay. And the whole display is a ball of clay for you to take and shape it, find a name for it, find a truth that fits, take a mocking look at the overall tint, and embrace the solid rock of the paradox.

A paradox like the fox who turned the hound around and chased him down, like the box in which was found a small town of Pandora’s playthings, a puppet without strings, the key on a key ring to a safe with no locks. Yet still in the end the fox died where he may, as a result of what lay in the jewelry box who’s top was popped by that puppet dancing without a leader making a choice phony as theatre in letting loose a calamity which required no key. See the ease in which a switch is flipped, your state of mind is tripped, and sent tumbling to its knees? Like when the crow got to keep his cheese or a kingdom was given to Mephistopheles for crying out about his needs.

Now, you’ve steered into the River Jordan’s Reeds, and you’re foundering in godly weeds with the first apple’s seeds sticking to you like burrs. They’re fetters to a chain around your brain causing pain. “Don’t think anything new! Just accept our View”—This fundamentalist hullabaloo surrounds you. Christ is all around you. Religion abounds here feeding off the people’s fear without giving two cares that it’s tyrannical, Satanical, despicable, and hypocritical. At least that’s how it seems. But here in Africa, they laugh a lot, they crack it up, let steam erupt, go make it up, and let service be a place to be seen, make a scene, to dance and sing, celebrate the King of Kings, and then, at the end, pay a little somethin’, something.

Religion. Decision. Original Sin.

Is God a clod, or a sticker of pins?

No. He’s neither of these things, so why paint him so mean like an omnipotent fiend, some friendless being with a lawyer’s ring to His speech? Like all He had to teach was the worship of rules and jewels, Yules and spools of golden thread, a religion for the dead with all its rewards in heaven, raising a din about sin, with no Divine Leaven for honest men. A pox on the pall! A paradox will pierce it all!

Like the mountain of rocks in a sea of sand, like the hawker of those in the bush for that in your hand, like the unlikely socks to walk out of Custer’s Last Stand, and the lonely flute in the crowded band that turns the excited scene suddenly bland. By some powers in the course of some hours, the rocks turn to sand themselves, he who crookedly hawks get six for twelve, the socks meet their end on dusty shelves, and the flute finds company to wake the locality to a tremendous Bacchanality that dismisses all technicalities of personality that deemed it dull.

Feel the supreme pull of this extreme bull being taken by the horns, thorns and all? It’s a coarse fall into the unknown, a verifiable twilight zone, of foreign faces who see you as the emissary of other light skinned races. Asking if you’re Germanic, Hispanic, Arabic, or Asian—thinking they’re all pasty Caucasians, alabaster aliens, from ivory nations, the incarnation of pecuniary salvation, with the title of foreigner. Then you turn a figurative corner and it’s a transparently other charm you’re under. They rip your protestations asunder, excuse your every clumsy blunder, and demand that you understand they’re doing all they can for you, the guest. Feel free. Rest. Hospitality at its best, and you feel blessed by all the care arrested in their chests to be vested in your breast as if you were worthy of these festivities and this mystery of a proclivity towards generosity despite the light afforded by history.

The paradox of a pine box from which light poured forth, the fifty-eight forts on the coast which opened the sore, and the series of locks meant to hold down the floor aren’t enough to bury the box and still lighten the room, repair the injury of the opened wound, or construct locks enough to hold the doom and gloom of what’s buried in the dungeon room; a history bulletproof to broom’s sweep meant to keep it under cover. You can never forget your mother’s mother’s mother and her brother in chains, and the people today in pain from the ruin that’s been made of their economy. It’s a shame to see poverty when there’s luxury, happiness when there’s misery, gluttony sailing over the needy drowning in a sea of prosperity. You still perceive the cannon bore’s roar while the past horrors rain from castle battlements and my own skin’s tint. The Cross is an ominous hint that presides over all of it—A perversion of the Lord’s Word used to people God’s Acre, by priests who were fakers, men who were takers, and unsuspecting bakers who are guilty by omission of common sense. Where’s the gate to the fence of understanding surrounding it all? I can’t imagine the shawl of ornate cruelty that covered their eyes.

But so easy to despise the actions of mad men, in this current “then,” but when the past was “now” was their cruelty masochistic malignity or was the whole world peopled with inhumanity—the calamity of a greedy insanity, a conflux of all conviction and predilection following one central addiction: that of wealth and power. It was an ominous hour when the Gospel, turned sour by a cowering Christian morality, came to this black principality, and, finally, the weight of this is too much. The answers can only be touched by a dive into paradoxical mystery.

It’s a sight to see, a single honey-bee doing the work of an infinity possessed of certain zeal, a lonely beetle breaking bread processing a meal of potato peels, and a little wren building his den, just a lily in the field. Shielded little Birdie never knows that manly peal, “Your fate is sealed! Your life is a wound that can’t be healed!—except in death.” Now, take the span of breath and realize it’s not to be without the bee to fertilize the fields of greenery, think about the mess we’d be in without beetles to rummage through our rubbish bins, and know the wise little wren sees more than men who watch from beginning to end not to realize it’s never been, missing that existence is penned only in the present then, and doesn’t stretch from future to past, first to last, and stern to mast with a roll-call for the steadfast cast to be screened somewhere in between the waking and the dream—the whole damn happening is a sham of incessant perpetuity, a falsely cycling certainty.

And, you’re on your knees in the red dust knocked down by a head-rush that’s paired with a feeling of relative ease. It’s nothing to sneeze at, the fact that your new habitat resembles that of your favorite story book. Worth another look when Africa’s your backyard. Doesn’t that sound that backward? Bizarre to be looking from where you’re looking from. The wild kingdom beats its drums and you freeze numb—search no more—that’s just the score you were looking for. This is the song you heard all along, a steady bass that, in this case, quite fits your tastes. In front of your face, it falls into place. The cuffs match the collars and the curtains match the drapes. Your clay’s been shaped into its final state; the substantial weight of adulation’s hock locked in a paradox. One that can’t be caught by all the talk that should be taught: moderation in these things: clip inspiration’s wings: find out what it means to put limitations on the elevation of your sensation. Sounds like suicide, a game of hide-and-go seek that never peaks until the end of the week when the whole thing reeks.

It probably tastes like it smells—like a disaster fell into the stew—but the True in front of you is a subtle roux that’s easily misconstrued if you get confused and misread the cues, but you can’t lose this War of Attitude. Make your every mood think you’re rude, with the power you exude over it. Descartes said it. Conquer your brain’s lobes and not the globe. Customize the strobe light of your insight to peer at higher heights and not thugs who fight and think might makes right—like bed bugs they bite only at night.

That’s why you have to let yourself shine. Make yourself a sign that says, “The world is mine. Not because of what I take from it, but because of what I make of it.” Not these daily clips that can’t brush the fingertips of the man or woman I am and what it is to be human; the blessed majesty that hits us when we take a stand, the hemp scent of the noose in the hangman’s hand, and the fear that brings. You’re a caged bird that sings, and the imprisoning is of your own building. The design utterly sublime, waiting for a time when a little rhyme can take you out of your worn rut—that deep cut, you make with your everyday dance—the path of least resistance. Follow your common sense, or the common dense? Being militant or diligent? Remaining tense or taking your swing at it, letting ‘er rip, and pulling a rabbit right out of your habit because right now you can grab it and you can’t go back to it? It’s this one life you get. Get the most out of it, or answer the pale rider’s writ, chomp the bit, take the hit of slings and arrows. If you’re too narrow not to quit then you’re not fit to have it as good as you have it pulled by this one gravity, all this air to breath, sights to see, and—though small among infinity—you, me and beautiful trees. Now, generally, how often are you ever that lucky? Honestly?

“Almost Never,” replies the clever Doc who patches the Paradox Pox that came out the box from which all this sprang—to continue what I was earlier saying,

it’s a strange land to be a stranger in,

but, maybe, I don’t see the danger in

doing in Africa that which is African.

-Back to the top- Enjoy.

-Kegen Dean Benson