Silence behind poetry
Poetry seems, paradoxically, stronger than words.
Words echo so often, the noise of the mind.
Poetry instead tingles, just at the edge of silence.
“Writing as a creative outlet…” As if creativity was trapped somewhere, with someplace else to be…
“The creative impulse.” Expressions of creativity; life’s momentum for itself; the cosmic dance of evolution…
I echo here, a silence “within.” Words, expressions of the delicate edges of evolution, tumble forth, bouncing off the page like raindrops evaporating on a summer afternoon.
The perfect page, fluxes and ripples and dents under this onslaught, leaving in the wake of time, a story of thoughts unfolding.
A seed fell. Breaking open, the germ becomes the spout becomes the stalk becomes the bud becomes becomes the petal giving scent. Falling again, the petal becomes soil to nurture the seed.
Thoughts are like this petal, staining the ground with their decay, passing away naturally like clouds in an empty sky, nothing remains and yet nothing has changed.
Is it joy that I am brought in writing these words to friends? Is it joy that these words convey? In one sense, they seem a meager way to fill time…
“… Resolving by our work to pay the debt of our existence… Amen.” — A Sufi prayer, uttered at mealtime.
Yet is this the spirit with which this mind echoes thoughts through lips to page?
Just some small moments left and what I might count as the workday, and so I fill them with the exercise of writing – truly in hopes that some small seed of generosity might be left waiting in the patient earth, for the passing bloom of day.
I rose this morning late, heavy under the rain of the night before. Vanessa stirring patiently, quietly in the house, awaiting my awakening.
We chatted, she offered water, I drank.
The ritual began.
Carefully, in the state of attentive meditation, she took up the movement of my limbs, ranging joints, stretching muscle and ligament and tendon.
We listen to the audiobook, today speaking of the natural place and nature of conflict as a source of growth.
Today was shower day; a minor ordeal, most often more pleasant than not. Today was that way.
Nonetheless, sleeping in, shower, the morning went long and it was not much before noon that I made my way through the house and to the office.
Brother David called somewhere along the way and we chatted as he prepared to journey east, further in-service to an aging father.
The pace of the day was neither staccato nor legato, but somewhere in between, not deep earth, nor clear water, but the soft mud, dynamic with life unseen cloaked in the midway mixture.
And so from work, to meditation, and then to write, to bid the day a quiet adieu to retire into the dark, the germ of tomorrow deep within my heart.