The flight of a heron piercing solitude. Thoughts of Love.
A Mozart symphony. Nietzsche and Shakespeare. Pondering how,
If we are free of the future, why do we sense its finger always upon our pulse?
Yeats’ poem to Irish actress Maud Gonne (after her refusal of marriage)
Spiraling in my mind:
I would that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
William Butler Yeats, 1892
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awakened in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die….
I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more.
Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
I picture how we begin each life as emotionless shells,
Confined, room and time, separate and apart
Held, egg-like, in hidden spaces by ancient unbound gods
Yearning to abandon numbness – craving for the time
When our souls, like daybreak, will burst free with the Passion of lightning.
Yea, Yeats is right! We do inhabit lands where Time forgets.
Where the collected, precious few we choose who hear us, small awhile
Dwindle when we’re gone.
But you and I, like the lines of this verse, will not let loose the fire
Burning in us today.
There’s a Divinity shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.
A future, even when we are not yet aware of it, that makes laws for our today.
Yet on a given night, karma notwithstanding, we alone shall be the lightning we create
Among the rocks and waves, between the purity of our love and all of its thunder.
We tear at our shells.
How thin is the skin of innocence? I don’t understand.
How deep is the well of existence?
I don’t know, but not knowing is enough for now.*
As unavoidable as creation itself, existence is laced with love, with suffering for fellow man.
Arousing a longing in us as distressful as authentic.
And if these atoms can create this love, this pain, this passion and this meaning
They can do it all again.
And likely will and have.
* In so many of its forms – poems, plays, and other writings – Deep Weavers search beauty for truth, conceive of joining arms, side-by-side, as one way to another’s love. As long as you can feel the plight, the grace, the charm, the suffering, the beauty and the joy of our fellow creatures on this planet, there will be ample meaning to life. There will be unending fulfillment. Universal love, beauty, and truth are all we need to know on earth (to paraphrase the ending of an Ode by John Keats).