There are times when it feels like I have built a complicated web with my life. Like it has become something I am trapped within.

Day to day events are connected by sticky strands glistening with the substance of my life to related points and those intersect other areas with shared meaning or intent. A strand of similar experience jumps across the web to touch on something that happened deep in my past, interlacing with the combined influences throughout the entirety of my existence.

I look back and see how each thing I’ve done, or not done, affects every other thing I’ve done or not done like one of those timeline layouts you see in the movies where people and events are connected by string. Only, my life covers all four walls, the floor, the ceiling, beyond. The strings run from event to event, finding and establishing relationships between each of them, until the entire room is filled with notes and pictures and string.

It is the linear timeline of my life laid out in five dimensions like an infinite web and I can’t walk into that room without becoming trapped like a fly. Nor can I leave it.

But I am not a fly, and it is only a trap if I allow it to be.

For the last year I’ve allowed it to be.

I’ve let it become the impossible labyrinth. I’ve chased each thread looking for an exit. But there is no exit. Only more pictures. More notes. More string.

Standing in that room can be overwhelming. Daunting. Haunting. Intimidating. Trying to see where my life is going from the view of where I am is impossible. The web is everywhere. It can not be followed.

I’ve been standing in that room for some time now. Pointlessly trying to make sense of it. Missing it for what it really is. A jewel.

I stand in the center of it where the edges of the many facets look like strands of a web, but from outside it is a gem with so many faces that it catches even the slightest light so that it shines like a small sun. Each of the faces connects to the faces of other gems, other people, and the entirety of it blazes like a supernova.

No, I am not trapped in it, I am it.

I close my eyes, breathe, let go, and shine.

Image: “Magic” by Karina Vorozheeva.

Published by J M Greff

J M Greff is the rambling author, trucker philosopher, peace loving hippie, spiritual warrior, backpacking pantheist, wandering minstrel, and poet fool who created A Caravan of One for you. View all posts by J M Greff