ripples expand from some unseen center where a fish feeds, and when stillness returns i welcome its short life
POEM: Ripples & Stillness
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I shambled out to watch the fine-fired light of some bright but distant star. The message in that moment was old news -- more than ancient & less than relevant, yet it was the only news on offer. If one traced that line of light back towards its source, one might find the source no longer existed, its last instant recorded in the caboose passage of light as it whizzed past.
There are those who hold marked places, and those whose place is in the sky. Most have long forgotten faces, and a few never said goodbye. There are those who rose in thick smoke, from fires whose flames were fanned by hand and cautiously, carefully stoked while, to the last coal, they were manned. There are those whose stones grew mossy - keepers now buried at their side. And those with headstones so glossy who've only just finished their ride. And all will vanish in due time, there's only the fortunes to say whose tales will be told at bedtimes, and who will vanish to smoke gray.
The world stands like a frozen waterfall, a river paralyzed, impossibly. And silence replaces its rushing call. In stillness, it spurns gabbling audibly. How can a cataract become so hush, its business being unceasing motion, spending its days, constantly in a rush, dispatching raindrops back to the ocean? Yet, now it's a tower - still as a stone - that looms like it's never known transience. Its icy curtain, hard as a shinbone, offers a wholly different ambience. I can see its beauty, but am still sad, thinking the falls should be beyond the fads.
The question asked: "Am I enough?" Which begs the questions: -enough for whom? -enough for what? What would it mean to not be enough? The Economist in me says no one ever acknowledges when enough is enough. [That's what we are taught as baby Economists: that the fundamental condition of human existence is that people's wants are endless, but resources are limited.] In yoga, we have Santosha & Tapas [contentment & discipline,] which seemed at odds to me for a long time -- until I considered that being happy with who one is is only in conflict with efforts to be a better version of oneself if one makes some pretty f***ed up assumptions. I've been told, on occasion, that I'm "too much." I don't know whether this is better, worse, or morally equivalent to being not enough.