Utterance
Sitting over words
Very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
Not far
Like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
The echo of everything that has ever
Been spoken
Still spinning its one syllable
Between the earth and silence
W.S. Merwin
It is early fall. The sunflowers that were in glorious bloom just weeks ago are now hanging on withered stems. The last pears have fallen to the ground, the last walnuts gathered. The corn is waiting to be cut, swaying in the wind like exclamation points against a darkening sky. It is the season of harvest, sowing and reaping, year after year, rain or shine. We live in a transient world, shimmeringly ephemeral, yet we long for permanence – is there anything more ridiculously futile?
Sometimes I think we are continuously creating each other. We may be different in form and function, but we are all made of the same substance, After hundreds of thousands of years, every atom has passed through every other kind of atom. Every particle has belonged to every other particle. What I call “me” and what I call “you” are really inseparable. Our particles are so close together that there seems no distance between them. We are interpenetrating spheres hovering on each others’s periphery. So what we do and say unequivocally affects the lives of others whether we want it to or not. From this mutual belonging emerges our most basic understanding of the world. It is an intriguing physics.
The seasons, the sunlight, the winds, the rains, all the changes of nature affect my relationships. I believe there is an organic unity to life, not a growing set of differences. Until the within becomes, the without shall be in chaos. It is an elemental truth of nature rediscovered again and again.
I am sitting over words, choosing each one carefully when others don’t. Each syllable casts a shadow upon my paper. In this political season friends scatter like falling leaves upon the wind. Sometimes I feel discouraged, but I know within me resides a merciful being who helps me to my feet however many times I fail to be mindful, compassionate and forgiving.
