This is a sentence. And so is this. And this is an essay. Or is it a poem?

Whilst I have learned how to write an essay, I have not learned how to write a poem. Although it’s difficult to remember where or when I learned how to do, well, anything.

Obviously I learned how to breathe whilst hearing my mother’s lungs, as I first emerged inside her uterus. And then as my heart heard her’s beat, and my blood pulsed through my veins, I learned how to move, feeling into this vessel we call life. And as I emerged outside of my mother’s body, in my body, in the life we call life, I watched and slowly mimicked and found my way with these words, in this language that we call culture. It is here that life is also called life. It is here we word many words. And it’s through this skill, how I learned how to word, that I learned how to learn – I read and I listened – and I eventually mimicked what my teacher called knowledge. And as I learned I learned more, and I learned so much that I forgot that I learned what knowledge was. And so knowledge was called life too. And that’s where you meet me, in this knowledge that we call life.

My name is Anton Rivette. My name is my life, and though I changed my life many times, I only changed my name once. My knowledge of my self wasn’t perceived by the world surrounding me. I wanted to be known differently, and the society that surrounded me only listens to the words that I speak. And sometimes they don’t hear them. People listen and yet they don’t hear. Sometimes they do yet sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they mimic. I mimic. That’s why I changed my name, to walk the talk that I was speaking, to live in a way, a new way, that I learned by seeing. I was named after my Dad’s family and yet I was raised by my Mum’s. So I changed my name to the name that I followed, the name that I moved with. And the more I moved, the more I enjoyed moving.

I tried yoga, another word that I learned that guided me into a practice that I learned by moving. Like a child again, I literally stumbled through new letters or postures of a language I couldn’t speak, that I couldn’t read, that I breathed. I was learning, I was feeling and breathing the language of experience. If words are knowledge, feelings are experiences. And those feelings or movements felt true or new, I just wasn’t sure because I was learning new things about myself that I hadn’t felt before. Words that I couldn’t speak but I could feel. A felt language. And as I moved through the world in this way, I saw the world in a new way: no longer seeing through the eyes of knowledge, I was feeling existence as I experienced it. And these experiences became memories and these memories merged with the forgotten knowledge that I read and listened to. It was no longer right or wrong. It was true. It felt true.

And what is not true are truths. I learned truths when I was listening to a teacher, and yet now I feel what is true: a moment to moment experience of this and that, of here and there. And though everything is separate, everything is together. That is true. I feel life, I feel all of us here together, and yet we are not. This is true.

You are probably reading this through a kind of technology, whether it be paper or a computer screen, a phone screen, any kind of screen. Name your technology and create a life, a new consciousness that emerges whilst we are afraid of dying. Of course we will die, I learned that when I was listening. And if I am listening, I am not hearing, nor am I seeing, and I am not feeling how life transforms into death. I am not learning this new way, this new life, or death, I am too busy talking to Siri and Alexa. Or tweeting with Elon Musk and Kanye West whilst watching reels of the Kardashians.

Life.

And as I sit here, this night, a night in my life, I stop to think.

What am I thinking?

I’m not. I am sitting. I am breathing. I am writing. I am seeing the light that bounces off a small table in front of me. I hear the fridge. I also hear a buzzing in my ear that I don’t know if it’s tinnitus, which I read about in an article on a website. I learned all of these words that are now a part of how I experience life – my felt truths – a part of the truth that I see, that move through my brain and merge with the knowledge that I listen to.

Truths are objective, words are objective, culture is objective and what is true is subjective.

And so I stop. And I think. And I stop again. And I breathe.

Is this true?

What is true?

I wish I could write this for you. Maybe it would make sense? Or maybe it will draw you in through the way that I arrange these words? These are all words that I learned when I read and listened, and now I sit and feel and I write to you. And I hope as you sit, and you breathe and you feel what is true, you remember that this is a truth that I wrote, and a truth is not true.