Bring your own salt.

T he doctor slides banks of sensors over her bare, slicked tummy. The whole room click and hums.  I bend around banks of green machines aimed at Cathy. Surely you don't need all this stuff for a routine check-up…what on Mars do they all do? Cathy glares at me. She likes this doctor; a  sweet and wrinkly octogenarian. The doctor says, “Nothing can grow here.” “Except new life,” I mumble. “What’s that?” the sweet doctor cranes his head around some contraption. I look at him. What I see is a stick in a grey robe gripping a blinking green device. But also very wrinkly. A wrinkled stick. On this point, at least, we fully agree. To be fair, though, he is almost exactly how Cathy described him. The kind of man who takes the Book of Standard Practices as gospel, who can recite it word by word even after shooting an entire syringe of Red Dust. Except that he’d never touch the stuff because that would be a deviation from the expected protocol as stipulated in section so...

"Daddy I want this one." His son stands looking up at him with the picture book held above his head like an offering. Earnest little face. Such trusting eyes. The man knows all about this book. He's read about it, its alleged effect on children. In it are nonsense rhymes and painted images, fantastical creatures worked into everyday scenarios. A surreal cast to it all. Things of shadow behind doors. A lion curled around a little boy's leg under the breakfast table as he eats his eggs. The boy's eyes are glassy, doll-like. A little girl pulled through the slit at the bottom of the door so that she comes out the other side a flat little girl. It's creepy as hell. He looks down at his son. The boy is mesmerized. What has hooked him? What does he see in this, what is it that calls to him? The man can only think of the dark thoughts to which these images lead (to which he is lead), and how all this fantasy can only muddle a developing mind, confuse what is rea...

The farmer tills and tends the earth, her harvest feeds our bellies The writer, well, he feeds our souls and that matters deeply too With fickle seed he sows a yield we’ll never touch or see, yet careful please don't blunder here thinking his crop will never be. Farmers mend fences They set traps to keep the wolves at bay Negotiate with neighbours' need And keep the house in order, as they say, in one piece. Writers, though, they take this peace and wander the collective Conscience This is where they reap and sow, producing stuff of ineffable nature: still food for mind, sustaining thought, which must be chewed with eyes, and gulped by ears, and viewed with open, open open Heart. The farmer needs her man, the writer, as he needs her nurturing embrace They share in laughter, under blankets, there they've made balance so few mammals ever do thei...

Yes. There is a common, abstracted Path, the one we all walk. But the way it plays out for each of us, our individual journeys… that is always unique. There are overlaps, but mostly they're messy and inconsistent, like the sketched copy of some intricate blueprint – clumsy fingers hastily trying to recreate what was glimpsed but now gone, those precious moments of revelation. It's comforting to find footprints on some forlorn pass. Those who've been before. To follow them for a while and muse over the age and location of old campfires. It's fun to bump into the travelers along the way; to trade stories and advice, to join forces and walk together for a time. But always there comes a parting of the ways, and each must ultimately tread their own Path. No matter what. And that is painful, but the pain passes, and the joy you've shared always outweighs the loss of a companion. Well, depending on what you choose to dwell on, in your mind, as y...

All sense perception is illusion, all is filtered: the eyes and the ears are but simulacra of actuality. Our mental maps can't do it any other way. They obscure that impossible ocean of energy surging its truth throughout the fundamental fabric of the Beyond. So, basically, your five senses are lying to you. They're lying because they are giving you a partial truth. White lies. Limited, mothering you, protecting you from daddy's overwhelming awesomeness. But they have to, because we can't look straight into the sun for very long; our eyes are only jelly. Perhaps, then, when we delude our selves by choosing (whether knowingly or not) to see the world a certain way, that is why we then actually do start to see the world that way. Nothing changes; it's the same (objectively) except for all the differences (subjectively). Your belief system is a lot like a radio receiver, which you can tune to receive any of the available frequencies along its spectrum. You ca...