The joke of my life.
Field Notes of Rahgah - 20260909-S4
A door shows itself only to the one already fit to pass through it. Everything before that was preparation with no idea what it was for. From outside, an entrance looks like darkness. From inside, it is the last place the light can follow you.
Technically it started at the end of 2019. I was fat, tired, drunk, full of fear, deeply unhealthy, and one evening after dinner I was simply done with it all. I wasn’t inspired, I was done. There is a difference, and anyone who has quit something for real knows which one ushers in a change. I finally woke up to myself standing at the edge of a threshold I knew I would never be able to cross back over. For the first time in ages, I welcomed the uncertainty.
So I ran through it, literally. Then I built a gym in the garage and lifted. Blood work went from a list of problems to a list of numbers. Body fat settled between 12 and 13 percent. Running twenty-plus miles a week became the floor; a single uninterrupted mile was a long-gone achievement. Two years of this, a pandemic in the middle, and not one thought about consciousness or awareness or anything above the neck that wasn’t a training plan.
I was fixing a body. That is all I was concentrating on doing.
One winter evening, I was outside in my backyard, I looked up, and I cried. It wasn’t a sad cry. I was frustrated, like many others find themselves at some point in their lives. I wasn’t born with an obvious talent, nothing that I could identify since I was eight years old anyway.
I was crying because, nearly two and a half decades later, I still didn’t know what the hell I was meant to do with my life. I knew there was something I needed to do, but what? That was the first time I consciously surrendered to the universe. No longer raging against it and the cruelty of it all in the human existence, I made myself available to receive. How the transmission arrived didn’t matter. What I had been doing up to that moment didn’t work, and I finally saw it for what it was.
I haven’t been the same since, and I mean that in the plainest way available: the person who walked out that evening did not walk back in.
Here is what I understand now that I couldn’t then. The order of events absolutely mattered. The sky didn’t come first and inspire the body. The body came first, and the sky waited patiently, as it always had. Whatever came through that evening needed someone to notice and catch it; the 2019 version couldn’t catch a glimpse of his manhood in the shower, much less non-physical contact.
Two years of running and lifting were preparation for something I had no idea was coming. The instrument had to be rebuilt before the signal could be accepted. You don’t get to know what you’re training for, you find out afterward that you were.
Everything since has been the same work in the other direction. Command moves down: mileage, heat, sleep, the body doing what consciousness wills it to. Listening moves up and in. Anyone who thinks the practice is a departure from the physical work has it backward. It’s the second half, and it cannot begin without the first half being, at the very least, recognized.
My boys only know the version of me that runs before dawn and draws stone heads in a desert. They’re growing up inside that result instead of empty beer bottles.
Now the joke.
For most of my life, I made fun of spiritual content that tried to get into popular culture. Spiritual rock concerts, spiritual graphic novels, spiritual-whatever. It never worked; it always felt like someone with a conclusion went shopping for a costume. Audiences can smell a delivery mechanism and performance from across the room, and I had a very good nose.
The one exception was Moebius. The Airtight Garage left me with “huh, so that’s what this looks like done right,” but I never asked why. Here’s the why: he wasn’t trying to smuggle anything, he improvised page by page with no plan, and the drawing was his practice. Whatever spirit is in that book is residue of the state he drew from. He wasn’t preaching.
I have now turned into everything I thought was dumb. This is the joke of my life, and I like it, because I finally see what the mocking was.
Disinterest is how the veil hides a door; I wrote that last week about past lives. Contempt is the same thing at higher gain, and it comes with a clue attached. You don’t spend years ridiculing something you’re standing far away from. The energy it takes to mark something as beneath attention is proportional to how close you are to it.
I wasn’t mocking spirituality from a distance. I was guarding it until the body could carry it. The gentler, kinder being on the other side of the joke was not earned by becoming what I mocked.
He was there the whole time, behind the guard and the oversized ego.