You know that sensation when you repeat a familiar word until it becomes alien and new? And then you can't see the familiar anymore, and the letters themselves threaten to become squiggles and arbitrary marks, and we sense our three-year-old selves peering out through tired eyes?

Do this for the whole world.

Say to yourself, see for yourself, do for yourself, this simple thing:

Everything.

[ think of everything: every fight, every embrace, every grubby choice and unforgiving minute, every transit through goose-flesh and near-tears, every sad counting of each worn riser on narrow stairs, and all rumination under the canopy of stars.      include the mosquitos and stumbles, every heart-burst and downfall, every long tick moment tick of tick ticking tick boredom tock, every come and spill and each drop of sweat, every particle of phony redemption for gain's sake and every gasp of betrayal.      each and every time you let us all down, and all you have ever foresworn but returned to -- and especially oh best beloved include the arc of, and resonant breathless cadence inside (beat beat beatbeatbeat), all acts of kindness, every generosity, and each gift you've ever given or been given.       include your disappointment when it didn't fit, the realization that they already had one.       include death and pain and war.       include the patience and hope of the plowers and their children, the desire of shopkeepers, the solitary waste of rich and the lonely grief of starvation.       add cartoons and weed-whackers and grapeshot and patent pending and the photo of the dead cowboy and how the Amazon pushes fresh water for two hundred miles into the Atlantic, and all nervous and shivering-ing tachyons and baryons.       add your dreadful secret, and add it again because it will slip away, as it always does.      add hope.       add the heat death of the universe when those last tachyoni and baryonses wink out – then add hope again.       add the lost religion of the Saharan grasslands, of 100,000 lost years ago, when the world began to dry up and turn to sand and they retreated and retreated until they became Egyptians, clinging to Mother Nile.       add the first eyes to see snow as we apes went north, and add the first eyes to see Earth from our teeter-totter moon.       add the whole Earth, from the carbon-based infestation, thin on the surface, to the pure red heat of magnetic iron that pushes magnetism – add magnetism! – up through solid rock! – to force away the blind and dumb and punishing radiative poison that is the effluvic and indifferent gift of our life-giver sun – add how, by pushing it away, the Earth itself allows us to lay aside our book and shield our eyes and watch our child sprinkle sand on her toes – and then feel the ache, the bewildered core, of love.       include books.       include sand.       include all children, from all of time, before and after.       include everything.       think of all of it, and let it boil away in time.        now: think of time.       now: forget time.       forget to think.       lose all sense of it, then sense it new, without thought or idea attached, then re-include all ideas and thoughts world without end amen.       be senseless.       be aware.       be.  ]

Do this again and again until the world is alien and new. Do this until every atom in every combination becomes squiggles and arbitrary marks, a scoring upon and a burst disturbing and a ghost in the aisles of: emptiness. Make of light itself a race to nowhere, from nowhere, an infinite burning that shows us everything and nothing, in turn. Be on the brink and then become the brink of all meaning and no meaning anywhere, until the grip is upon you oh best beloved, the clutch and cringe and ecstasy of all and nothing and you can make no formal sense of any of it and everything fits, everything is a wheel in a wheel, turtles all the way down, and you are just the mote you always are – but a mote who knows. Teeter here.

Now say yes.

 say yes yes yes yes i love with all my pearly wonder the whole mess of it all yes our bad behavior yes hole-in-the-world saints yes ordinary strivers yes sunsets in the gobi yes cracked linoleum yes tappity-tap battles yes mother's touch yes balloons (balloons!) yes language (language!) yes say me you yes say yes yes yes yes

 later I will do the dishes yes later I have bills to pay yes later I will wither and perish

 but today, now, nownownow – I say yes