I see something on the top shelf that I would really like to have, but I can’t reach it. No stool or chair seems to be tall enough to give me the boost I need. Is it because I’m small, and everything about me so overwhelmingly large that I still cannot reach? Or is it a trick of the light, an illusion that fools me into believing that what I think I want is real?

But it feels so real I tell myself, and surely seeing is believing, or so I have been lead to believe by learned members of the society within which I live. Even though I can imagine myself reaching up to that high shelf and taking what I so desire, its distance is deceptive like a ray of sunlight cutting across the landscape. You can enjoy its warmth and bask in its light, though its source is so unfathomably distant that hope of ever reaching it seems like an impossibility… is an impossibility. At least physically.  And so my dilemma curtails my ambitious attempts to grasp a feeling, a connection with something that is as tangible to me as a sweet juicy tangerine in the palm of my hand, yet as illusory and vaporous as an opaque and beautifully formed cloud hanging in an iridescent sky.

My frustration mounts as I wrestle with my inadequacies as quantified and qualified by physical circumstances, and the lack of a  long ladder, long enough at least to reach the moon and back.

Then I begin to contemplate, to wonder what it is about that which I so desire to lay hands on, to hold against my breast, to smell and taste, and share the air with that makes me feel so lost without it, even though I have no recollection of what that would be like except for in my imagination?

The physical is just another dimension of perceivable reality so I hear, but I feel it is not the sum of its parts. It is the feeling inside me that is created by my objectified desire, a feeling that cannot be put into words nor moulded into a singular thing, nothing that could possibly even begin to contain the intensity and complexity, and the breathtakingly overpowering feeling that could consume universes, and consumes me like an inextinguishable fire.

The physical is the vehicle for emotional intent, more affectionately known as the soul… the conscious impetus that makes all things come alive and have meaning, that gives me a reason to keep trying to reach for that which I desire on the top shelf, but only to satisfy the human in me. The little person that requires strong legs and a metronome, and a tenacity that Hannibal would be proud of, to traverse mountainous landscapes, cross oceans, and climb tall sky-scraping trees to come close to what I feel so separate from.  To satisfy the need required of physical time and distance, the red and blue of it all; like a film playing out to serve the telling of an epic tale, where I am the protagonist not an audience member, observing idly from beyond the woven fabric of the silver screen.

The only thing I know I can do is to close my physical eyes and not see the objectified world before me and around me. To divorce my desire from the image I see way above me in my waking guise. And hope that my intense need is met in some other way, made real for me as a change within me, an altering of perception powerful enough that when I reopen my eyes I am standing on the top shelf embraced by  the physicality of my desire made manifest by worlds colliding and becoming one; a fusion of senses, of vivid colours painted upon my new corporeal existence, and in my completeness illuminate the world below as the sun and the moon from deep within the cosmos of a shared existence, replete with the deafening fanfare of the stars pulsing inside my chest, and the sanguine tinge of dawning skies coursing through my veins, visceral and full…