We search the heavens looking for that extraterrestrial Big Brother because we want to believe we’re not alone, that life isn’t an accident about to be snuffed out by the next asteroid. We want to believe our lives aren’t random. Yet life is inevitable, and as expressions of life, we’re inevitable, too.

We are meant to be. Though Something precedes us and creates us, Life could not help but create Its children. Life couldn’t help but give rise to Its own offspring any more than we can help bearing children, any more than a tree can help spreading seeds which give rise to forests. Love is infinite expansion, and it is in Life’s nature to always create more of Itself in each moment. We are God’s destiny.

Our specific natures may not be inevitable. Your name, your height, the fact you’re a chocoholic or that you’ll live to be 87. Those facts may not be preordained. But your existence is. Life creates and creates more of Itself. As Its children, we cannot help but be.

To never have been born is a futile wish, for we will always be. It’s said there is an endless cycle of birth and death, an Endless Return, that we cannot help but be. We must learn whatever lesson it is that they we’re trying to run from, since we can’t outrun ourselves. We repeat until we learn the endlessly cycling lesson, until finally we choose to move through the illusion and find that waters in which we thought we’d drown are only inches deep. Then our circumstances pass on to other things, like images in a vast kaleidoscope too vast and complex for us to understand.

That’s the bad news. But it’s also the good news, the even better news, and the great news. For it means we are eternal. You form may pass on to something else, to some new form. But these are disguises worn by an ineffable being which plays a vast trick, a great game with itself, within itself.

Life cannot be extinguished. It can only change in form. We are as inevitable as tomorrow’s sunrise. And to each of us an endless number of days. Each day we’re born, each dusk we die. In death, we sleep a while, and rest until the next day’s birth. Cry not, therefore, for anything you think lost, since inevitably it shall return to you. The earth buries the sun in death at dusk, only to fly from the perch of its horizon each dawn.

© 2022 by Michael C. Just

You can purchase the book through this website. Or go straight to amazon at https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+dirt+journey+of+a+mystic+cowboy&crid=1S40Q4BXSUWJ6&sprefix=the+dirt%3A+journey+of+a+m%2Caps%2C180&ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_23

Mike’s other titles, including The Crippy, The Mind Altar, and Canyon Calls, are available through this website or through Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B002

Four of his short stories have recently been published online:

Lies, Ltd. has been published by The Mystery Tribune @ Lies, Ltd.: Literary Short Fiction by Michael C. Just (mysterytribune.com)

The Obligate Carnivore has been published by the Scarlet Leaf Review @ Category: MICHAEL JUST – SCARLET LEAF REVIEW

I See You, Too has been published by the 96th of October @ I See You, Too – 96th of October

Offload, a short story about a man who can heal any disease, is now live and can be read at The Worlds Within at Offload – The Worlds Within