A Thousand Thoughts

When my son learned how to play Minecraft, I couldn’t get my head around it, nor could I keep up with what he was learning. He kept getting lost and not being able to find his way back home within his world. A friend (young enough that they grew up playing the game) showed him that if he switched from creative mode to survival, then let himself drown, he’d respawn at his home base and then he could switch back to creative and carry on. I found that a bit dramatic, and rightly suspected that this would not be so good for his very sensitive mind.

First stop, Googling ‘how to find home in Minecraft without drowning’. 

Select a compass from the inventory and follow it. A COMPASS. 

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I was born with a compass. It seems strange not to use a tool made for navigation, but we learn how to live from those around us, and in a variety of ways, it didn’t take too long for me to conclude that the compass was faulty.

In the citadel, the walls had messages etched into them. One of the walls read ‘Distrust everything, but most of all, distrust yourself’. I read it so often as I walked through the streets, and heard it repeated, that eventually it became true. There was no need for individual stargazing, and the compass could stay tucked out of sight.

On the road to that deathly conclusion, I showed people the thing I held in my hand more than once, the needle quivering due north, the group facing south. Against the advice of my compass, I walked behind the others many times, feeling that internal pulling apart of my mind. 

I swung between consulting that compass and following the words on the engraved walls, those guides I was told to trust because I couldn’t trust myself. I couldn’t kick that habit, that stargazing, that testing of the magnetic field. It would sweep me up, swell my heart, and I’d get carried away in the moment. That sound! The thick wub wub of my cello when I played two strings together! The compass led me there, I followed, and it was beautiful.

‘That’s not beauty’, I heard. ‘We’ll tell you when it’s beautiful. You don’t know beauty.’ So it wasn’t beautiful anymore.

Like the fool I was, after I’d shrivelled and died for a while, I’d repeat the whole thing. A thread of conversation would catch on my sleeve, and I’d stop to unpick it. Joining those discussions made my brain light up, ideas colliding and running out of my mouth. Then sometimes I’d see from the corner of my eye, expressions I didn’t expect, but learned to. The words were wrong. The place and time and dynamic was all wrong. The good that I felt following that straight line had made people uncomfortable, and it wasn’t good anymore.

God in the wind, God in the water.
That’s not God, that’s the devil.

Fizzing transcendence of connection.
The eternal is later, drink this cup here and now.

But my compass! Do you just see – my compass? It led me here to all that is true!
That’s not a compass, that’s a snake.

Remember the rules. Distrust yourself.

Maybe it wasn’t the compass, it was me. It wasn’t faulty after all, it was in faulty hands.  My soul was too heavy, made with those sharp metallic edges that poked people, whether by accident or not, sending the compass needle haywire. 

I caught all those parts of myself and reined them in hard. Committed myself to learning the truth, which certainly didn’t live within me or in the direction the compass sent me. I could tame my feet and tongue, steer clear of tools best used by men, and pay my respects to the citadel walls. The compass was placed where it belonged, out of sight, not quite forgotten. A longing persisted, I missed it, I grieved something improper to grieve.

The crumbling of the citadel walls wasn’t an obvious thing, but there was a collapsing of edifice, a reckoning, a walk through the valley of the shadow of death. No rod or staff to provide comfort. Dry bones, everywhere. Imagine then, the dreamlike discovery that some precious artefact survived a disaster. Picture it held tight in a hand, dust still in the air, fingers peeling back to show a small metal thing on a face-up palm. The glass face isn’t broken, and the dial moves when it’s bumped.

The truth isn’t out there, in a goose chase mapped on the walls. A compass, held in my hand, mine to follow, leading always back to the breath in the trees, the divine in the cheeks and legs of my kids. Sacred flesh and blood in this life, here, now. A living thing. It was always right; it came here with me.