The Dog Still Howls

There is something permanent you can always return to - with your soul, if nothing else.

The star-scattered canvas, a dark-blue smudged inkblot across the sky - a second home, perhaps a first. The numbering doesn't particularly concern you. All it takes is tilting your head back far enough. Words become unnecessary here. Something fractures quietly inside, and imperceptible tears trace their own paths down windburned cheeks. A familiar sting settles in the nose, the smell of ocean, but you're no longer there. Only the stars above you burn exactly as they always have.

What does it matter what a city is called, where the next political border runs, when above you stretches this boundless stellar abyss? You want to dissolve into it. To become one with the pulse of the universe.

From the height of stars, perhaps we will one day find our way to something true - shedding false values, illusory goals, and the primitive aggression we've been carrying since the beginning.

We have arrived, after all, at the conclusion that the deep essence of things cannot be grasped through subjectivity alone.

Only a complete release from the chains of old beliefs, representations, and attachments - the ones that hold the current self in its fixed shape - can lead to genuine insight. We must let go of everything that once defined the borders of the "I" : physical form, memory, emotional bonds, the conventions of social roles. Entirely free of limitations and concepts.

"I am pure, undiluted Presence - existing outside the bounds of space, time, and causality. Absolutely open to any possible experience, without prejudice or fear."

And meanwhile, love has drunk itself into dissolution and lost itself somewhere in the city's labyrinthine streets. Only her faithful dog remains, howling mournfully at the moon.

Irony has swallowed the whole city whole - and crowned itself the symbol of counterfeit intelligence.