Where’s your last inch?

(No, that question wasn't meant to sound filthy, but bonus points to you if it did I guess.  ;)

I've been thinking a lot about that "last inch" lately — the immediate reference in my mind is to V for Vendetta, but it goes farther than that – and yes, times are crazy, as tend to be those that spur such thinking.  Here are some of those thoughts, and of course I'm interested in hearing yours, too.

• The last inch is maybe the first inch, in the sense that it's the first inch of power-cord after the place where you plug into the Source.  It's where the power is the most pure, and also the one remaining piece you need to have in order to say you ex-ist (literally, protrude out into the world of form).
• The last inch is where your mandates for living come from:  Think of Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet (and read it if you haven't!), where he asks the young poet to dive down to the part of himself that is essentially, irrevocably alone, and ask it:  Must I write?  (Or "Must I [whatever]?")  If the last inch says yes, then that's not an optional part of life for you; it's part of how your connection to Life (the force) is defined.  In my mind this is similar to asking the coupling on a fiber connection, "Must it be pulses of light?" For someone else — a Cat5-person perhaps — the answer to that wouldn't be "yes, it must"; but if your interface demands it, it must.
• Expanding on that, you can't give away your last inch unless your intent is to give away life, the Universe and everything; and to do that is suicide, so you'd generally better not!  …But if you don't recognize what your last inch is composed of, you may not recognize that you shouldn't offer it up, for someone else, or in exchange for something you really want.  The last inch is dangerous if it's unknown I think.
• Back to "fiber people" and "copper people"…Rilke says that there's a place inside each of us where we're totally alone, and I agree with that — we all go there in the moments before death, at least — but I think for some of us it's our last inch, and for others it isn't.  Some people are made to be bundled — most of them, actually.  But while communication is an essential part of life for almost all of us — what good is a totally isolated interface? — for some of us, a certain amount of insulation is necessary.  We are, perhaps, sensitive to interference, right in that most delicate of places; right where we plug in.

Your last inch can keep you alive, keep you going in the face of amazing adversity, if you know where it is.  And if you don't know where it is and what it requires to function, you can accidentally damage it, which is the spiritual equivalent of damaging your lungs.  

I have time to catch up on projects this weekend, and one that I'm spending a lot of time with is my last inch…when you next get the chance, I recommend this activity highly…while at the same time slapping an NC-17 on it, because good fracking oil-earthquakes is it scary!  ;)