The Ahh-ness of Things (or The Sentinel of Mono No Aware)

Peonies

**Ok trigger dear readers: death & suicide***

A shared collective consciousness. That's what the Utrom call it. It allows us access to one all inclusive data bank of thought; memories, emotions. New Age gurus talk about it as if it's only as simple as interconnectedness. The idea that all things are a part of one another, that we can all pick up on each other's vibrations & energy. That's true; all life has this ability, but it goes so much deeper than this. Instincts, primal reactions, the Buddhist understanding of Ego. Fight or flight, fears, inexplicable joy & comfort that comes over you all at once. The way a mother looks at her newborn as if she already knew them, somehow. Past lives. 

There is actually no past life, regardless of the experience of reincarnation. There is only one life. Your life along with everything else's. All one big voice. One experience. You do have individuality; free will. Yet it's really as if you are different components of the whole one big thing. Someone once compared it to all beings affecting the whole of existence a each wave affects the ocean, as a whole. All of the little miraculous serendipities or synchronicities of life. The way bodies try to synch when embraced, the way a song affects you deep inside & artists all over the world begin creating similar expressions without realizing it. Or how something as raucous as a good thrash show can bring some people almost to tears; like it's a thing of delicate beauty. I can tap into all of it, but they never speak to me. The Utrom. It's like I'm someone they refuse to see. Like I'm Nobody.

I can use my inherited Utrom access to shared consciousness, to see all of these things, but I cannot communicate with them. If I could I would ask them my purpose. How did I actually come into being. Am I just a failed experiment to further the Utrom Krang's plans to destroy everything & all of humanity, even the Earth itself? Was I a fluke. Like Donnie believed himself & his family to be; some accidental byproduct of the Krang. 

After all I had learned over the last six years, I had found it was all possible, & it was all maybe something more. Something everlasting & even spiritual. Spirituality, fate, destiny; they're all just the acknowledgement of connected energy, right? Perhaps accidents have their place in fate & destiny as well. What if it's true? What if everything, even the things from our nightmares, happen for a reason. Noni found herself asking this question, the same as Donnie had asked once, the same as I had asked when I stared over the edge & wondered; what if I took the possibilities away. What if I chose what would happen next, by ending it!

I awoke

Lying there on the floor, I had this indescribable wish to be able to share my memories with Norjannah Ibera; of Donatello when he was really young. Not just how kind & tender hearted he was, albeit he could be impatient as hell, but also how he was such a goofball. The insane ways he tried so hard to keep my attention, always trying to impress me. I hadn't seen how important it was, but she did. Because he wasn't ever really trying to impress her; he was trying share something with her. He had a daydreamer's heart. A philosopher's constitution. The wondrous soul. I wanted him to slow down & be more assertive all at once. She just wanted him to take his time & be at ease.

All of space & time is like the folds of a peony flower. Layer upon layer of interconnected lives & experiences, in this plane & others, that seem without beginning or end. It is in fact non linear but it does connect all of the layers ultimately to a single core. A sort of soul family. You are one, but you are individuals. You have your own path but it is shared with others that are a part of that core existence. That collective consciousness is present when you meet someone & it's as if you've known them all along. You all at once feel comfortable & safe within your shared jokes & almost immediate understanding of the other. The way you look into each other's eyes & know that you are recognized & appreciated. Love, & it doesn't have to mean anything more than just that. But it could. I could see them, & wether it was their future or some other life, they were wonderful. They would always be there for one another & their life was beautiful.It may sound ridiculous, but I loved her too. She was a part of his life & therefore a part of mine. 

To the Utrom; those uncorrupted by Krang, all of the above was understood as pure love. A pure white light in which perhaps your purpose is only to uphold another part of your collective soul. The unconditional acceptance of one another, where it would never occur to you to hurt or disregard one another, because that kind of love cannot even acknowledge such things. Krang; the Utrom elder who had taken their own individuality & oppressed it upon others until they were no longer aware of their own free will, had realized the advantage over others provided by Ego & Fear through of all things, creation. I was one of their creations. At least in this incarnation. They did not create my soul, & I know I must have a soul because I know that I have been here in this plane longer than my present physical form. I have existed in other lives & other realities, so I must have some amount of energy that exists within the eternal collective.

 I have memories of these other lives. I have seen these other versions of myself; living out a different story of my life. There are others who validate this, no matter how crazy it makes me feel inside; I know there are others who can remember me & are even aware of separate timelines. Renet has shown them to me. Leonardo has dreamed of them & visited them on the Astral plane. I feel it in my heart that Donatello is aware, but he refuses to ever say. Ironically; theories of relativity & physics were his favorite conversational pieces. Somehow, this is the one part of his consciousness that I could not freely access, & why would I? I would rather him speak on it; it was obviously something deeply private to him that he wouldn't divulge.

I have things of my own that I will never be able to put into audible words in his presence. There were two of these realizations that never left me, in fact they haunted me. One of space & one of time. There was this scene that left me with the feeling you have when you wake from a nightmare, & you keep having to shake off the feeling that you know it wasn't real. A scene of a fat little cockroach crawling across a floor. Consciously & purposely pushing a small crystal in to a ventilation grate in the wall, like a dung beetle rolling its ball of poop. My mother & father are there in the background, bouncing a baby April on their knee. Renet is calling my name & I realize we're sitting in my car & I'm crying uncontrollably as she tries to console me.

The other is far reaching into the past. Where a young girl would marry a boy she loved without doubt, not only because of her unshakable love for him, but also because he was close to death. They would have one child; a girl who was called Botan, whom he would not live long enough to see. Their daughter walked in fortune, bravery, & brought honor to his memory. All that her name sake proposed. This girl called Botan, would then pass in delivering her own single child. She & the baby would die in the very room where her father had, & with them his blood ceased to exist.

 I could still remember how easily the small knife meant to cut the mother away from the grandchild had slipped into my liver so that I could be with them all again as quickly & quietly as possible. I remember the morning sunlight shining in on us through the open doors as my daughter's lover rushed to our sides. I had imagined I would arrange things just as simply as Ikebana. These flowers cut cleanly & laid beautifully like a memorial on the floor where life had begun & ended so many times. The silent newborn who had only for a second opened its eyes upon the room where the daughter had been created, the father had died, & now the mother by her own hand; who held her child & grandchild as their blood reconnected as it seeped into the blankets beneath them. I imagined I would find them on the other side, whole again & we would bloom & continue on where we grew, anew.

I never found them again. Instead I remembered a boy under a kusunoki tree on the edge of the forrest where he & his father & brothers would hide. Traitors to our clan! Traitors to my master! My katana poised to slice his throat, yet just before I fed his blood & his dishonorable tears to the peonies that grew beneath where he knelt, there was something in his eyes that called me home. Something in those wide, dark eyes that I could not forget throughout space & time. Yamamoto Tokumatsu, the second son of Yamamoto Yoshitaro had seen into my soul at the moment of his death & his soul knew mine.

*