“If I am I because you are you, and you are you because I am I, then I am not I and you are not you. But if I am I because I am I, and you are you because you are you, then I am I and you are you.” – Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk
I stood atop a large stone near Cheyenne, Wyoming, threw seventy-one words into the air. They in turn broke into syllables, light strands born from phonetic care. The Northwest wind found its way from Horse Creek, from its bed on rye grass there, and it picked up the sound of my faltering tongue and helped it climb to heavens stairs. Beneath the arch of a streaked Cirrostratus, I saw the opening of a womb, and even though my eyes were closed on earth, I knew the birth of something would happen soon. Something caused me to quietly stutter, let the seventy-second verb commit, to fly its way onward toward the belly of the skyway to the ledges where angels sit. It was the dawning of a new day dawned, when a secret was paid on rent.
For in the terror of this mind of a boy inside a man, was an image of the prayer of host to sail on the seven winds. And the words they came in brokenness, the sounds from my dry, dry soul, in the sounds of a thousand nights gone by, when I thought myself not whole. With the chanting of all darkness-committed saying unto you, can you see he’s about to fold. It must have looked like danger for something sinister to abound, to see a ragged man of fifty-seven letting loose his vocal sounds. To stand upon the rock of that not known and leave his ego on the ground. To utter something in another tongue to let a craft come unbound. To reach inside the vale of my heart and cut the chords of the seventy-second found.
I stood atop a large stone near Cheyenne, Wyoming, and prayed in verbs without a noun. Prayed for your lonely shadows, that they would connect your mind somehow. Voiced my words for trouble consternation where the evil ebb does flow. I whirled the names into the air, with an unconscious cry, with the atoms of creation lining up by myside. I prayed for my family, a world that I do not know, and the when I stared into the womb of heaven my inward eyes did glow. For falling fast with angels, like lightning before the rain, came the kindness of the ancient one, in the ancient of its days. An energy unto itself with the universe at its display.
And it turned the seventy-second word the name of its command, burned itself into my soul from where the water from its hand ran. Came a knowledge that though I was dead in resurrection here I AM, came a small voice from deep inside me whispering from dusk to resurrection here I AM. – 04.23.2018 – דָּנִיֵּאל