Vachon Imagined

Ah, anxiety, my old friend. You again, trailing behind a thought about tomorrow, perhaps peering into yesterday.

There you are.

I look at you the way I might look at anything else: present, happening, here.

Where?

Well, in the place where all things are happening before they become a thing, before they become an effect. Before the effect, there is the cause, and before the cause, perhaps there is only electricity—an electric pulse wrapped inside another pulse, thinking itself into a thought, cascading like a light bulb over someone’s head.

But that cannot be the whole story.

The head is not the totality of mind.

There is the body, too, carrying its ancient wisdom. There is the heart, speaking in rhythms long before language arrives. There is the breath that moves in and out without instruction, the impulse that reaches for life, that bends toward knowing, toward being. There is the mysterious current beneath it all—the force that moves a hand, expands a lung, quickens a pulse, and somehow knows itself through experience.

Is that where the mind is?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps it is a field of consciousness we are all standing in, circulating through, born from. A vast ocean we mistake for our own reflection when we catch a glimpse of it in thought.

Anxiety, my old friend, masking you with medicine did not work. Pretending you did not exist only made you louder. So instead, I make a solemn bed for you, a place where you can lie down and be with me, and I with you.

No more wrestling. No more disguises. No more attempts to cast you out.

Just this:

You belong here, too.