Have you ever given yourself up to a long shot of a cause?

Do you know anyone who makes codependence fun?

What is the most free you have ever felt, and was it at the same time the most crazy? The most intoxicating? If you did not edit yourself, would you seem insane?

One of my best friends put it something like this, “The next morning, my outgoing message list breaks my heart.” Tell me about your drunk text experiences.

• http://www.quietbabylon.com/2009/05/29/6-things-that-give-me-a-crushing-sense-of-scale/

These Secret Vespers installments are tagged with scale, though many others could be. That crushing sense is one of the hardest sensations for me to put to words. Like love, hope, and so many other pre-verbal feelings, I find I can set it up with words or art, but that’s all I can do. The rest happens in the viewer or reader.

I get sort of dizzy, sort of light-heading, and I feel sort of outside myself when the scale of something big hits me. The traffic seen from above a major highway does this to me. The ocean, especially when stormy, does this to me. That documentary, Baraka, does this to me.

But enough about me. What has given you a crushing sense of scale?

There is always another way out. Your same imagination that has you in its trap can have you anywhere else. Have you ever known someone who came to the brink, believed in the trap, then found a way free?

Herman knows all about your issues and calls you out on them every chance he gets. But who is he? Who does he think he is?

I have kept the phrases my friends and I made up. A teenager is “a case of ginger ale”, empty praise from the human resources director is “a licorice reward”, and the rocks that reach out into the bay of the small town where I grew up is “where the dragon fell asleep a thousand years ago”. There are others I can tell you if we meet. These phrases are the best things I am keeping. The things I left behind were difficult to part with. Otherwise there would be no virtue in giving them up. There was a Spanish helmet everyone thought preposterous, but that I loved. There was my guitar that, miraculously, stayed in tune for three straight years. There was my best friend.

Is it crazy to take a bus this far? The route follows secondary roads where towns have had time to grow, places you cannot reach any other way. The curves, the stops, the boredom. I only wish it could take longer. I wanted this so badly. I could have flown, but that would ruin it—too clean, too impersonal.

When I arrive I will step straight down onto the broken asphalt of the parking lot. I will part my lips to breathe and let the dry air dry me, Austin. I will be in the thick of your scent, your dust. Any change worth making has to come up from the ground with the heat, has to press against the soles of the feet.

I don’t know who you will be; I have rinsed my expectations clean. But I want to feel that rush of nerves, to laugh with you without knowing where laughter leads, to kiss you without knowing how a kiss can thrill. And you will give me a new phrase.

I found my flute. The old case really did have dust on it, and I sounded worse than when I quit at 23. But the notes were still there, my breath steady, the shrill and endless loops of my mind gone silent. I remembered a Bach partita, and played it full of mistakes. I have never been more pleased.

A year ago I only made time to speak with friends in brief exchanges on the phone, often from a cab ride to some awful obligation. Now I spend hours with them for no reason at all. Yesterday I just sat on a stoop with my friend and all we did was bounce a ball. Really, I don’t even think we talked. It was perfect. I don’t miss a single one of the places where I used to eat.

The world is ninety-nine percent poor if we judge this in a certain way, and I am not out to glamourize poverty, but are you sure you judge the right things valuable? I thought I did, and that is exactly how I lost it all. We want to be free of the tyranny of need, and yes, in a way that is more philosophical than greedy, we do want to optimize our markets, fund our dreams, extend our knowledge and our powers. But why construct a game where to win is to concentrate financial capital, rather than to convert it into other forms: society, art, liberation?

What are the things you have accumulated without happiness? Do you own your things, your positions, your privileges, or do they own you? What you would be happier to lose, if everyone else would lose theirs, too? Let’s stay up late and throw it all away. And when this mess is over, let’s dance. Let’s dance like the light playing on the rubble of a ruined city we will one day rebuild better.

What are the ways you might pull yourself apart, and what do the results look like? This is the second in a series of six installments beginning here: http://secretvespers.com/2008/07/21/pieces-part-1/