I glimpsed the red hourglass, vibrating in a stone wall -- a Black Widow spider, bouncing on a thin web spun within the void of an absent rock -- that gap forming the spider's recessed hide. And instead of being happy that the spider had found a fine shelter, I worried that a child would stick a careless mitt deep into that wall hole, and be bitten on the hand. In retrospect, this seems so unfair to the spider.
The last lamp out dips the room into darkness [sudden darkness] and in the nothingness, before vague shapes form, a clunking sound triggers the stab of an adrenaline spike into ones chest -- mainlined frisson, or fright: the heart thumps, the chest cinches, the stomach lurches, breath is sipped spastically, and an involuntary noise escapes from some unnamed place within. The power of strange and startling thuds and whumps has fueled many a storybook, but though the mystery is rarely solved, we get over it soon enough.
The lonely lighthouse keeper, peering through a deep-set but narrow window at waves smashing onto the rocky shore, spouting upwards in a fanned geyser. So much depends upon his maintenance of momentum, but the better things go, the more dreadfully boring is life, and when things go poorly, there are russian roulette odds of tragedy. Like life on a mountain, but when someone crashes into the mountainside, the mountain-man is an unlikely participant in the tragedy.
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.
i watch the drifting clouds and my mind synchs to their speed and i wonder whether i'm the cloud or the cloud is me and i know that i'm not moving and yet i feel i am and i know that i'm not weightless and yet i feel i am and i know i can't live aimlessly and yet i feel i can
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.
Evergreens line the trail, transporting me to a place -- higher and harder -- where one might expect trees that refuse to yield for seasons.
arches echo ahead, stretching to the end of time left into the labyrinth, right to the blinding sun it's a land of stark contrasts on one side, great adventure but great peril on the other, painful monotony of well-lit spaces then there's straight ahead: a ceaseless repetition of today throughout all your tomorrows
bleached in bright sunshine -- thin, wispy white clouds are barely seen amid the washed out skies some summer day -- sending one running for sunglasses to avoid a blinding headache it seems the world might fade into a tabula rasa, or blanch anemically
pain nails me to The Now there is no pulling away the only escape lies in finding the drift, riding the swells until there is nothing but those sacred undulations
Tiger Riding for Beginners 