tl;dr

She was searching for the language of her soul. It wasn't in fireplaces or closets, she had discovered, or inside clouds like the seeds inside of fruit (she learnt this from her first air-plane trip). Nor did it resonate from any speaker or shine from any lamp. It did not hang in petalled boughs from the trees in spring and fall from them in autumn, or flutter against the screen-door in a passionate rite of seeking entrance to the kitchen, or make its nest in the ceiling among last years newspapers and eggshells. Several experimental holes revealed that it probably wasn't hidden in the earth - lying awake at night she heard only silence from the stars. Sometimes she caught glimpses of syllables sparkling in streams and rivers and heard snatches of vowels echoing underwater in the bathtub, but it was such a watery, elusive alphabet that she could not contain it with the dragnets she cast about her. Without it she began to feel soulless, inhuman, when she was only unable to speak. Circumstance was the only culprit, in not providing her with an older, more experienced soul to see and draw her embryonic speech out, first in whispers and eventually in wholly-formed narratives, but she did not realise this and began to assert that the disease, or just a crucial absence, was within her, that she wasn't properly formed. And so her soul remained silent, as if it wasn't there at all, an unregarded, dormant part of her being. She felt that she was nothing, or at least nothing profound or beautiful or sacred; to make up for this lack she decided to feel Important.

***

In this crazy onion of which only every tenth layer is real, in which transubstantiation is the squeezing of a sacred stone thrown by a drunken pitcher and caught by his enemy, am I losing the trail? Is the trail losing me? Has anybody lost a trail? Trails, trails for sale. What do do? Pause for sigh? Sing a song and dream on, wear a sweater, wear a thong.
Samsara, said Siddhartha. Life is suffering. I wonder if he meant that for all possible worlds, or just this one. If there are an infinite number of universes, infinitely variable in form, then surely there should be those in which conditionalised suffering does not actuate out of mere being. I mean you wake up happy and go to sleep feeling even better, or even just maintain a status quo of staying positive. Or perhaps there is nothing worthwhile in every single universe - that seems pretty daft. How will we fare if even the gods are just mindless manipulators of clay?
I think that the landscape of the soul must extend in directions that are invisible to us. New Zealand is a kind of ridge on the predominantly submerged microcontinent, Zealandia, which of course is only a flake on the crust of earth-pie. I, we, must have (and share some) sunken temples and water-logged fields. What if I am just one of the livestock in a peculiar herd of spirits, only a few of whom share this planet with me?
Bewilderment. Vast, aeon-spanning bewilderment. Cosmic confusion and stellar delusion. What if our universe is neurotic?