Transition

For too long the desert below had been silent. For too long it had been arid and barren, any water jots immediately seized into the squandering, dessicant wind above. For too long that wind was hot, weathering all it blew over in an unprovoked war of erosive attrition.

Hot dirt. Good for nothing. Nowhere to go. Helping nothing. Inert and wasteful. A static chemistry of wasted potential.

Like a fractal, the desert is recursive. You could inspect half and it is still a desert. You can take half of that, and it is just as barren. You can go down to the very depths of exploration, from macroscopic to microscopic to nanoscopic, to each grain of sand, and there sits a homunculus of the desert. A little doll with nothing to say. A speck. A smithereen.

Just as arid. Just as barren. Spurning the very molecule of that which might hydrate it.

The desert is immeasurable. All its facts or figures repeat with any dissection, digging, or surveying. Like the atom that can be explored down to its quarks, Planck lengths, and even strings, the desert's singularity is something that is only dry. It is one-dimensional, and that dimension is dry.

We fear those unlike us, and there is nothing or no one more unlike us than the desert. Strangers make for enemies, and this wasteland is mine. It is the unapologetic opposite of the human heart, lacking the fluids and the pulse and even the purpose-driven destiny to animate the otherwise non-living and dormant.

From my granular footing sinking ominously into the cracked earth, I stand my ground. Then I look up and I am humbled.

Recursion goes both ways.

And I serve as the conduit, suffering the mighty transmission that connects nothing to everything-all-at-once. I whirl in the vortex of vacuum where all and none reach equilbrium. It is an awesome obligation.

It is not intuitive. One must search, as I did, for the largest differential between the disparities of what is and what is not. It can be sensed with a sixth sense: the sense of our place in the Universe. I walk and search, not quite knowing what to look for. Like a vacuum, I will know it when it populates my shadow into relevance.

As such, one knows it when they find it.

Like a divining rod, I am drawn to the linchpin between the two realms. Within the probability cloud where all bobs in and out of existence, I feel the perilous tug from both realities:

Reality One: Nothing.

Reality Two: Everything else.

The vortex seems cold at first. Am I a stranger here? Can I belong? What is my purpose? But probability generates heat. And as if to underscore its importance, possibility burns! It might have been; it might be; it shouldn't have been. And their counterparts, shimmying in a dance of vying creation, setting up the galvanic charge that fuels eternity.

Looking both ways — down to the desert and up to the stars — is both being blind, yet blinding, respectively. I perspire. Soon I can smell my hair being singed. Unresolved existentialism hurts. However...

I AM THE OBSERVER. I OBSERVE. I DETERMINE. I MATTER!

I make the reaction go. I determine the collapse from plausible possibility to potential probability to perceived presence: what is real is in the mind of the beholder. The observer. The one who puts their fingers into the quantum slits.

I look up to the skies and can distance myself with perspective:

Removing myself from the waterfall's deafening inundation, I am so much more than the torrent of conception falling through the still air.

I look down, and know that what is below is as much a part of the continuum as I am:

Engulfed in the desert's parched silence, I was nothing but another grain of sand in the wind.