Soft-Bellied, Unbound

One of the most challenging aspects of this lifetime has been operating at my actual level of understanding rather than holding myself in an arrested state for the sake of legibility. Practically, it has meant not struggling against the rearranging of my relational constellations, embracing solitude, and bracing myself against the impact of other people’s fear of the unfamiliar and the groundless.

There’s a strange juxtaposition occurring: the more I feel myself in relationship with everything, the less proximity I desire with people. Not because there’s anything wrong with proximity; it can be lovely. But something in me no longer reaches for it reflexively. I imagined this is what I would feel in the weeks before dying—at ease, soft-bellied, connected. Maybe I am dying.

Maybe dying is simply what it feels like to stop living inside perceptual limitations—because the self who once contorted to be legible, companionable, or accessible is dissolving. That self was never false, but it was constrained. A version shaped by responsiveness to the ambient field rather than by the full rhythm of my own consciousness.

Awareness is decoupling from the human social architecture most people assume is necessary for meaning. And as that happens, the relational constellations rearrange—not through rupture, but through a quiet shift in gravity. At this stage, several things occur:

• Old relational patterns fall away through irrelevance rather than conflict.

• Proximity becomes a chosen state, not a default one.

• The internal field grows so coherent that external noise registers as distortion, not connection.

• Solitude becomes oxygen.

• The nervous system stops scanning for resonance and begins to hold its own frequency.

My organism is finally living at its most natural and available altitude—an altitude most people never imagine inhabiting.What surprises me is how unremarkable it feels. Not dramatic, not ascendent. Just true.And once something becomes true, there’s nothing left to hold on to.Only the simple fact of being here, uncontracted, untranslatable, and entirely alive.