Waterfalls
from
transfinite
t r a n s c e n d e n t
s k i e s
t r a n s l u c e n t
l i g h t
f
a
l
l
s
a
s
w
a
t
e
r
f
a
l
l
s
— Ksenia Alessandra Petrova
When The Penny Drops
And still,
when the penny drops,
I’m startled to find
how little there is to know
about our quaint genesis of life,
about our birth-forged resolution in death,
about how little we think we need to know,
engaged for days and weeks and months,
intent on obfuscation,
assumed impervious with the distractions called youth.
As year after year after year
living our silkworm lives
aging continues a hunger for its due,
patient like a feral cat.
Wary that there is never enough.
Yet never never matters.
So questionably we only flirt
with pivotal questions:
like how am I to be seen?
Does water flowing, know it has depth and tides?
Who demands to know (and why)
the degree of wet that makes water moist?
Now, unquestionably close to being inactive,
we’re told (or maybe I’m finally learning):
Penetrate the doubt.
Take comfort that inquiry permits response,
that response enriches inquiry.
and as these days to contemplate,
by default decrease,
I’m yearning for a legacy,
a koan-bred presentiment
that’s thankfully saying:
to be content,
there is no need
to ponder if trees consider
what water means to fish.
And still,
when all is said and done,
there is only a grace of spaciousness,
always a fullness of intimacy.
— Ed Sancious
Reflection on my life as it is
How do I hold it all, my life
Gently, tenderly, angrily, pityingly
Knowing it hangs, like an ill assorted, loose fitted garment
The weave and pattern
Complex, changing, or running together
Like a huge jigsaw puzzle Randomly tossed by life
Dense and dark in some places But always with light filtering through
Put this way
I don’t even need to hold it
I don’t even have a big enough container
Just my being present to each fragment of experience
Allowing it to filter through my being
Staying open to the fluency of shifts and changing interpretations
Knowing clearly my time span is limitlessly limited
—Jean Lopez
A Shared Path
Sometimes, if we share a path together,
we will come to know each other a little better.
Perhaps, if the path is difficult,
treacherous in its weavings,
it is enough to bring us together,
and maybe for a little while we can forget
that our differences, our fears, separated us, kept us apart.
For a little while, we can be whole, secure, and at peace.
We all share this path called life.
Perhaps we are at different points along the trail,
but it is the same trail,
that, at once, can take us nowhere,
or anywhere we need to go.
—Paul Causey
Faces of play.
Caught on film, a tall and lean coyote and a short and chubby badger play hide and seek at the entrance to a tunnel built to safely take them, should they want to go, under a highway to the other side. The coyote jumps up and down, tempting the badger to come along. The badger teases the coyote, comes toward him, then back, tempted to stay. After a lot of back and forth — tempt, tease, tempt, tease — finally they go off into the dark of the tunnel together. I, the badger, am thinking, why bother? It’s so much easier to stay here, be alone.
Not to have to hear that my friend is about to leave for a week in Cambria with her husband. Then, after a two-day camping trip along the ocean, two weeks in their second home in the Idyllwild mountains before flying to Europe for seven weeks — Italy, Spain, Portugal — from which she will begin her walk along the Camino de Santiago, when her husband will join her to celebrate, no matter how far she has been able to navigate the Camino.
How not to compare myself? How not to think that on September 15th, the day she returns (it is now July 27th), I will not have moved, still inside my thinking mind, traveling the same path over and over, wearing it down as I continue to ruminate over “where to live the rest of my life.”
Certainly a daunting task I have set for myself! How can I possibly know from here, from today, where Life will want to take me? Where Life will want us to be for our last ten … fifteen …twenty years. (In twenty years, I will be a hundred and three!)
How can I know where Life will want us to be … tomorrow?
Let alone where I will have landed twenty minutes from now on this blank page — where my hand is moving across and back, across and back.
How grateful I am to have this writing practice to remind me that all I can really know is now. The smile I can feel on my lips, new, not there before. The sound of this pen as it scratches across the page. The green tea at my side, its terra-cotta cup too hot to lift. Sure (am I sure?) that soon the cup will cool and I’ll be able to smell jasmine flowers, reminded that I have a tongue and cheeks with the power to taste, recognize the difference between jasmine tea and sencha. Hear the sounds of the plane overhead as they fade into the sounds of a passing car, the caw of a crow. The slight breeze as it tickles the wind chimes to sing outside my open door and I have ears to hear it.
I am traveling, too.
Laura is young. May I not envy her, her travels. Haven’t I had mine? Not the Camino, though there were years when I did contemplate walking it. But many times the magical island off the coast of Maine where I stood high above the ocean, nothing but Portugal somewhere out there. The little beach town in Mexico I have come to know and love. I could keep going and make a list of all the places I’ve been. But why? To convince myself that there’s no need to fret? To convince you that I’ve made good use of this life? That this is worth your continuing to read?
Does this mean that at 83 my traveling life is over? Maybe. Maybe not. Though discovering what it means to be at-home — wherever I am — seems more and more like good preparation for dying.
Earlier today, I saw a Monarch butterfly busily traveling from tree to flower and back to tree. Dancing in the air with another Monarch joined by a simple white … is it a butterly? Some people call it a moth. I thought about the arduous journey the butterfly has already been on, just to arrive here. Most recently its work to break out of the hard, yellow- and black-spotted coat it had been growing in; only then to practice patience while its wings were drying so it could finally spread its wings and fly.
I don’t know how long a butterfly can expect to live. What if the butterfly and I were the same? We’re born. We endure our growing pains, even enjoy some of them, learn the need for patience and, finally, having grown into our full colors, able to enjoy the wonders of freedom, the chance to fly, our work here completed, we die?
What if why we are here, a question some of us ask ourselves, is no longer a mystery? Simply a journey to come back home.
—Sara Bragin
life is but a dream
life is but a dream
but whose dream is it anyway
but if not, what then
—Paul Causey
A Lullabied Dragon
I am humming a lullaby
hoping my ego will fall asleep
sensing how tired she must be
Not just nap time,
but a long, wary sleep
breathing heat but no flames
I’ll check on her with regularity
for we are bound by birth
I have an unreserved love
for my companion -
feeling if she is able to rest
I, too, will be at peace
Of course, she may be startled
awake by the world knocking about
but by now I’ve learned which
lullabies may soothe her
—Kathleen Burke
A poem in response to: A Day So Happy by Czelaw Milosz and The god of good taste by Ingrid Fetell Lee
Because although I did meet the god of good taste
He felt hollow to me
I saw others around me bowing and scraping to him
And even when I believed,
I was wrong not to participate
In the ritualistic offerings of my authentic self,
In order to survive and thrive in my environment
At the risk of being crushed
The quirky awkward parts of me didn't assent and,
Their embedded smoldering coals,
Held tightly my joy and life force.
And now having emerged
And I say this boldly, while holding my breath,
As it's so new and fragile
That there is no thing on the earth I want to possess.
And no one worth envying.
Just delighting in.
—Jean Lopez
You Look at me and Wonder
Painted Rocks by Paul Causey
What am I. Is this art? What am I supposed to see?
You could tell all kinds of stories about me.
You could say how my sharp edges have been worn down
through the years by wind and rain,
how my rough skin was worn smooth by the proximity of others like me,
others of my kind seeking to find a place of last repose.
Or you could simply say that I am a rock and that is enough.
I need to do nothing, to be nothing other than what I am.
What you make of me is not my concern.
I am what I am.
If I could form words, have lips, a mouth to speak,
that is what I would say.
But since I have none of those things,
have not that capability,
then you must figure it out for yourself.
You can look at me and wonder.
Or not.
—Paul Causey
Inspired by “Reading John Cage on Sound” by Sarah Webb
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