escaping gravity

No matter how far I travel, no matter all my striving, looking and searching; I find myself no further along and without answers.  A sudden burst of speed only means my circle is smaller. I am stuck in a hamster wheel eating my own flesh.  Drinking my own decay.  Stuck only with myself, I drag entire solar systems along wherever I go.   How far must I travel to discover new life—to find what I truly seek?  To Mars I go.  On a rocket ship--on my quest for...what?  Knowledge? Gain? Peace?  Yet, even there, I am alone in a flimsy tent; distastefully ingesting the products of my own feces and urine—trapped in a death cycle.  Where am I going? 
​In the most desolate place in the universe, I discover what all who travel to that distant planet and scour its surface discover: Life is not on Mars.  But it is precisely within that emptiness, that I stumble upon what I need most. A most precious treasure. I discover I must be willing to die--to live.  I discover I must lose myself to find myself—to make it back home—to find the new life I so desperately want.

To escape gravity I must necessarily forego my attachment to this world—sever myself from the heaviest burden: the idea that reality is rational, objective, external; that it consists of me and “not” me. I must overcome the idea that I as a subject am separate from object—the two separated by action.  And that when a subject acts upon an object—when I cross that great gulf—I do so by my will alone.  I must wake up and realize that to have my entire worldview constrained by an insubstantial sentence makes me Marley's ghost tangled in my own causal chain—when I could be a living, breathing story. To think of my life as a sentence, or even a sequence of sentences, is to think of a cathedral as a series of bricks, or the Mona Lisa as strokes of oil paint. Those strokes, those bricks, those sentences have purpose. I must understand their place.  They sit within--they serve--a story. That at any moment my action upon the world exists is one thing—that it leaves behind a story is another.  Story is paramount.  It is what remains. A sentence disappears.  Life is a story served by sentences, not chained by them. Inverted, I will see existence as an endless sequence of drab somethings to strive against, through, and over—something “other”—always beyond.  
​Come with me. All you who have travelled far, searching the cosmos.  Come here to the water's edge. Look.  Lean over and gaze into the red Martian water far from home: 
    That Martian—that alien—that new life you seek… is staring you right in the face.