Mountain in the Clouds
I used to think I was at the center of an adoring crowd. I lived that way, in my mind. I thought all of you hung on my words. I was empty, so I created fecundity. I schemed and prayed.
I had illusions stripped away. Lovingly. Usefully.
I can only act when I am alone. Then I act for all of you. All of you in me.
One movement. One movement in space. Where does your will begin?
If you move to create a smile, you did not move.
If you move without a witness, then you have found your power.
To kill the witnesses is not easy. In fact, they must be forcibly removed.
Could it be, that your whole life was lived to deposit you in a place you could never find? It may have been more than one life. Perhaps, the happy death, surrounded by tearful children was the faltering first step.
I feel planets whose slightest move through space delivers infinite pleasure. When the ears are open, music is threaded across Being-Time and you have no desire.
I climbed that I might slowly prefigure an orientation impossible not to hold. I played as children do, before ignorance arrives. They know, and we erase from them because we lack courage and wish them to stay with us. These are real children, but they are also our first thoughts, newly born, and soon erased.
I am full of something that has no value. I am full of emptiness.
I become not what I seek, but the clear air that separated me from my desire.
I could never accept that it was this that sought me.
And now I have one name: Gratitude.
The Middle Way.
The Door which slowly opens.
The beauty that lays herself down into graceful decay.
The hand which relaxes before striking.
The Night, honored by your smallness. If you can grant that you are small, then you are the honored guest. You are what we need.
The kiss upon a troubled brow will be yours.
The first dawn, sword-sharp and beheld through tears...will be your doing.
The morning on faltering limbs, will have been precipitated by you.
The strength at noon. The running down of the hills, and the charging music of their ascents: your eyes. Your burning throat. Your voice in the hollows. Your ragged voice, and your tears at what grew in your shadow.
The Evening of a World. It's peoples, like wine!
Their thoughts...surpassing your own, intermingled with your corpse!
And your Joy in the sundown, in the dawn you Will Not See.
Grow, you, into your death. Into the life for whom you were a distant landscape.