Fresh Feeling

THE SHIFTING WEATHER plays a shell game with the aging.

With each missed guess, the walk gets harder. It's a type of wearing down, cheetahs and gazelles, coalitions of the quick who know how to outlast the tired and tiring. Little nips, jabs really, that take away your legs in the end. It's worse than a storm. Slow exhaustion that doesn't test your chin, but the old man strength you better be cultivating all the while.

Half asleep, a thought. My strongest emotions, welling up, seem to always drain into sadness. I wonder why that is. Good fortune my way, but the shadow looks for conspiracies, tears it down, as if looking for proof of its architecture. But not this time.

It stands. It reflects light. That's enough for me.
That will be enough for me.

Learning to convert shade into shining might be the best thing I'm finally learning to learn.

Happy Wednesday.

Morning Devotion

Holy, still morning hour. Bare and fragile these moments just before dawn find you. Sometimes you are the one singing, and sometimes the voices are in procession as you watch, as if from the sidelines of a funeral, a royal birth. So strange to feel brought low but not defeated, more like finding your knees to avoid smoke at face level. Now and again the mind races, tries to find a way to reflect some reverence proper. Instead you fumble with your hands, eyes darting. Didn't you once even bow?



Do not misunderstand. Drink and feed from the well. Convert it with all that strange machinery you have inside. Condensation. Distill.

You are broken and perfect and capable of multitudes and joy, even when seen from so far above.
Act through breath. Serve with best moments. In preparing for them, they are manifest. Do not forget the cycle called spring.

Holy still morning hour.
A genuflect of tears.
Dirt made clean
one more day.

I am grateful.

Jungle Love

"In the stream, coursing in veins between the forest pickets, stood a great hart. Silent as it went, easy like his gait against the vague shores, he collected nourishment of wildly abundant humus, which was found among the strangest cell configurations, trees, undergrowth, animals lifted aloft toward the sun. The stillness all around was eerie and stuck in your ear. A rich smack, a gurgle under the clay shore’s shaggy curtain, the slurp of suspicious caves, which now and then occurred like detonations about the woven stream, bore witness to the constant monotony of the process. Out of the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the great Pan still prowled.”

from Tropen by Robert Müller

(translated by the Internet + Me)