the nervous system (tribute to Josh Warren and Cavern Co)

I was standing on the edge of this huge cliff, and after a second's reflection, realized I lacked skin. I was a bodily network of nerves, supplanted and flowing into the stone, tenderly exposed to anything blowing my way. In the blank expanse beyond the cliff, the four seasons infrared their countenances, with winter making a sash of snow whipping in and out of the great flow, through the interlocked collection of nerves and stone. Spring and fall contributed difficult fronts of wind mixed with warmth and coolness, and summer pressed down its heat and humidity without remorse. I was in the most pain I have ever felt in my life. It was undulating, diminishing only to return with renewed energy. It wasn't just pain though. There was also a sense of joy, or rather the pressure of joy that couldn't be dismissed. I was included in this divine circle of nature. Being joined to the seasons all at once, experiencing so many tides of exposure and sensation, I had access to who I really was, or who I was intended to be. You could see the underlying vessels of feeling. Every stroke of the seasons applied a distinct color to those nerves. It was painful, beautiful, essential joy that gave and returned itself like rain and evaporation. It wasn't until nightfall when the seasons began to fade one by one and disappear into the night, leaving me ragged and refreshed, now detached from the ground and standing on my own two feet. Presently the moon rose and remained fixed in the sky so everything, including the ocean far below, was palely visible. After another quick reflection, I saw that my coat of skin had returned, and with it, comfort and silence. I was alone with the silver disc waxing my body with warmth. I first felt a sense of relief. The pain had vanished, the tearing, the harsh scourging of the winds, was gone. Deep quiet had replaced it. Neutral moonlight and soft ocean breeze surrounded me as I stood there, wondering what I should do next. The relief subsided soon but the neutrality only greatened. It was neither hot nor cold there, the ocean breeze neither sweet nor sour, but it consciously appeared I would be sacrificing myself to the exposure if I chose to go anywhere else. I didn't. I stayed. I felt so safe, so impenetrable all of a sudden, in that grey twilight, that for a long time I never wanted to feel the seasonal winds ever again. It appeared all the more as this feeling hardened that I was being given a choice: to be subject to pain and yet joyful, or surrounded by comfort and yet in misery. There was no unity between my body and the world, no more delving into the divine or drinking mystery. I was sitting alone in a transparent world in a boxed soul, but the boxing did its work and made me comfortable. But how that misery lengthened. How it felt more and more that I was cutting myself off from purpose and beauty, how I was being my anti-self by brandishing myself. People who do this for very long, I have noticed, become material wraiths. They become too solid for their own good. They walk around, ingrown, having lost the personality the seasonal exposure graced them with, and it is impossible to know them truly. On the cliff, comfortable, and in despair,  I prayed: "Bring back the community of the seasons. Bring back the faces that unearthed my skinny walls." As the gracious winter, spring, summer, fall flooded back, I think I finally learned the meaning of those ancient words: "All those who hate their lives will love it forever."