Such was her presence
She left eddies in the world
Long after she left
Tag: existence
Glory ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #334
Golden glory of sunrise
Remind me
Existence is a miracle thrice
That there is something to observe at all
That there is something to observe it all
And that I am both those somethings
Carapace Overturned
Tides and surf
Wash death’s remnants
Upon the shore
Autumn’s chill short days
Fell colourful leaves
To brown on forest floor
Nature makes no time
For funerals or grieving
In the cycle of life
Love and loss and mourning
Experiences of consciousness
Which is to say
When existence
Becomes conscious of itself
And learns to fear oblivion
Falling Away to Depth
The mesa falls away
Into the depths of early evening
Low sun illuminates
Undulating canyons and buttes
Sedimented sandstone
Layers indicating a scale
Powerfully daunting
And exquisite
And I
Stopped halfway between
Floor and ceiling
Sense myself in the centre of aeons
Epochs pass
Every hundred steps or so
Up the trail
A hundred years
A thousand
A hundred thousand
A million
Unwinding time
As species come
And species go
Great, fearsome lizards
Ruled the known universe
For 165 million years
But only in the last tens of steps
Before the top
Do I walk in the footsteps
Of my most ancient ancestors
A paltry 6 or so million years ago
I am reminded
For all our accomplishments and cleverness
We are but toddlers on this Earth
Itself nothing more
Than a pale blue dot
Circling a minor star
Spiraling in an outer arm
Of one galaxy
In a universe dotted
With hundreds of billions
Layer upon layer
Of time and space
Stretch out to scales
Unimaginable
A few steps more
I stand atop the mesa
Returned to the time and place
That belongs to me now
Deep, heavy breaths
To gain my equilibrium
While scanning across the vista
Tallying a few hundred million years of strata
A snippet
In an existence billions of years in the making
Layer upon layer of time and space
To make this collection of sediments
Which seems so very vast and ancient
But is no more than a cosmic blip
In all that was
All that is
And all that will be
I feel small
Fleeting
Insignificant
Yet
Somehow
And nonetheless
Stupendously magnificent
Because in all this immensity
Stands me
A self-aware collection of molecules
Contemplating the inconceivable miracle
That is my own consciousness
Tucked away in some small backwater
Of eternal infinity
Just how fucking exquisite is that?
And the view up here is awesome.
The sun sets
Light falls away to darkness
But for the little beacon of light
That is me
Carapace and Claw
What’s left behind
On this near side of eternity
Shell of existence
Shadow legacy
Husk of memories kept alive
By those who’d known the shell
But never the true nature
Of what it protected
Too the trails
Footfalls left in the sand
Evidence of passing presence
Echoes oft anonymous
No matter all this
Tides soon enough erase
While echoes fade
To silence
So cling to hope
For something beyond
The far side of death
Or suffer the fear of oblivion
A Little Bit of Infinite
Despite the ways
My eyes can see
My ears can hear
My fingers feel
My tongue can taste
My nose knows scents
The world I sense
Is incomplete
And even with our cleverness
The tools we build
Extend each sense
Take me beyond
Known boundaries
The world I roam
Is but a part
To this I add
Imaginings
My wildest dreams
Absurd theories
Draw with words and pix
Artistic renderings
And yet
What mind and heart creates
Is in some sense
Quite finite
(I’ll reach my end
In time and space)
While the possible
Is infinite
Perhaps some day
I’ll spend my last
And come to know
What comes beyond
Then grasp at last
What it all means
Become myself
The infinite
Will of the Wisp
My presence in this moment
Is but a wisp of a cloud
In a windswept sky
A drop of rain
In the eons of torrents
Which gouge a canyon
From a plateau of stone
Try as I might
I cannot grasp
The monumental meaningless
Of my own existence
Leaving me to acknowledge
The incalculable significance
Of drawing a single breath
Here am I
An infinitesimal ephemeral wisp
In the cloud-strewn sky
Of existence
Claiming my glorious place
In the magnificence
As if a passing moment in eternity
Were eternity itself
Cadence ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #301
The world moves
In its own time
And I in mine
A dance
A rhythm
Obstinate
Relentless
Cadence
Unique
To my mind’s
Perceiving
And should I not exist
To observe
As sun surrenders sky
To the stars
Would there be time
At all?
Lost in the Fog
The monuments we erect
To assure ourselves
Of our own greatness
Barely breach
The lowest cloud
Of nature’s modest creation
While the proof
Of our existence
Is a contrail adrift in time
Dissipating in the empty sky
Of infinite space
Remembering Epiphany
I squint into the sun
And existence becomes
A blackened vignette
With a sparkling path
Leading directly
To a burst of light
In a cloud-strewn sky
A vision I recognize
From those times of connection
When I was one with everything
And the knowledge of all existence
Seemed not only plausible
But within my grasp
Heady times
And I wonder
Was I mad then to believe
The epiphany was real
Or mad now to have let it slip
From experience
To memory
Now a personal myth
Pix to Words 