andmanandmanandman

i just went for a walk through the woods and i feel like an animal with clothes on. i spent two hours napping on the riverside and listening to music and looking at the trees

i am standing on a moon in jupiter where there are oceans of frozen nitrogen and i am walking through the cracked canyons in the ice and i am thinking: this. this is too big. this is too big for me.

so look down at your feet
don't look at the whole universe and don't stare off at jupiter
look at the crack beneath your feet
follow it

The truth was the secret, God first, the word, the word God, out of all the things and beyond, spaceless and timeless, then the void, the silent emptiness, vaster than any mortal mind could conceive abstract and precise and real and lost, the substance in the emptiness, again precise and with weight and solidity and form, fire and fluid,

i feel afraid kind of, because these things are so big i feel maybe day they will crush me, do you know what i mean, i feel overwhelmed and what if one day it is too much what will i do with my family and all my friends

if they crush you then it was what was meant to crush you
and you will survive and grow and the goodness inside of you will live wildly and freely
what do you mean what will you do with your family and all your friends?

and then, walking through the vineyards, I had seen it thus, the whole universe, quietly there in the mind of man, motionless and dark and lost, waiting for man, for the thought of man, and I felt the stirring of inanimate substance in the earth, and in myself like the swift growth of the summer, life emerging from time, and the germ of man springing from the rock and the fire and fluid to the face of man, and to the form, to the motion and the thought, suddenly in the emptiness, the though of man, stirring there. And I was man, and this was the truth I had brought out of the emptiness, walking alone through the vineyards.

what if i have to leave them forever or something, what if i have to start over in a cave somewhere like doug batchelor of what if i have to live in LA i would hate that, i hate los angeles.

I had seen the universe, quietly in the emptiness, secret, and I had revealed it to itself, giving it meaning and grace and the truth that could only come from the thought and energy of man, and the truth was man, myself, moment after moment, and man, and the face of god in man, and the sound of laughter of man in the vastness of the secret, and the sound of his weeping in the darkness of it, and the truth was myself and i was man.

i was walking through the forest with the creek there and keeping the soil moist and there were dried up vines tangled up in a yarn of vegetation or something and i climbed through all of it and there are thorns in my hair now.

and when you do not feel strong you are given others to be strong for you

quoted from:
Saroyan, William . The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. "And Man", p 103, New York: The Modern Library, 1941.