She flowed
Into the sea of humanity
With the ferocity
Of a flash flood
Creating whorls and eddies
And a floe of debris
Which endured long after
Humanity finally swallowed her whole
She flowed
Into the sea of humanity
With the ferocity
Of a flash flood
Creating whorls and eddies
And a floe of debris
Which endured long after
Humanity finally swallowed her whole
I watch you
Taking in the wide oxbow landscape
A thousand feet deep
While I photograph the small details
Of tumbled stone and distant valleys
If you could embrace
The vastness of space
Then even a galaxy
Would be a minor detail
In the landscape of infinity
And I?
Not even a speck
To speak my insignificance
Demands more consideration
Than my infinitesimal displacement
Of time and space deserves
And yet
Here are we
The infinitesimal
Contemplating the infinite
Which I suppose
Is big enough
For me
Perhaps
Even…
Divine
Like the way a river
Has carved this earth
For millions of years
And left a canyon here
To pique our wonder
No greater metaphor
To my reason for being
Than a remote highway
Through open country
I’ve not yet explored
With the tools in hand
To tell the tales
Of my discoveries
More and more
Discovery comes
As reflections of my self
In the landscape of existence
The winding path
Which takes me well beyond
Desired goals
Has served me well
Offered possibility
Once well outside my ken
Comforts challenged
Bound’ries shattered
With every step astray
From oft trod trails
Discover unknown countries
Within myself
A lesser man would I be
Who’d stayed the straight and narrow course
To some place known
When I’d set out
In a place of otherness
I revel in the sameness
That is two girls taking selfies
On a sunny Sunday afternoon in the park
Accompanied by song and food, and laughter and play
In a public square
Filled with food, and music, and play
I scan for moments
A click here
A click there
Another and another
Every picture tells so many stories
Though some obscured
And some unfocussed
While others extend
Beyond the bounds of framing
And when I burrow in
Ever more intimate moments
To be found
Until…
I am caught
Some days the world seems
So very small and I feel
So vulnerable
In the dream
I entered a cavernous space
Light streamed in through windows
Set in an impossibly high wall
It curved
All around me
The inner workings
The floor boards
I almost expected to see
Dali and a squadron of flying cats
So odd a place this was
Until I realized
It was me
I was inside myself
The walls and ceiling
Were my own skin
Seen from the inside
Pipes and beams my bones
But inside
Where my consciousness
Now found itself
Was a vast cavern
Of emptiness
A fear gripped me
That all I had ever been
Was a sometimes pretty
But entirely hollow
Vessel
I wept
Cried out
Tried to shake out the dream
And wake up
Until…
I smelled the rain in the air
Heard the droplets
Tapping the leaves
Outside my window
Felt the cool of the night…
On my body
Outside the vessel
Palpating it
To see if there was any truth
To the hollowness
None that I could feel
“But you know you are”
Came a voice
From deep inside
Ringing with echoes
The fear, again
The tears, again
And a sorrow, full
As the cavern
Was hollow
Then another voice spoke
With the sibilant promise
Of a whisper in my ear
“A hollowness waiting
To be filled”
Day’s end
A gentle paddle
On glassy seas
My body
At peace
With my mind
With the land
With the water
With the sky
My spirit rises
To the surface
Of my being
My consciousness
Swirls in the essence
Of all that is
Like eddies
Hugging a paddle
In a vast
Bottomless
Sea
So much depends
On the construct, Love
Conscious
Unconscious
Conditioned
Unconditional
Unshareable
Unless a context
Shared