Were emptiness real,
would I still drift, dream-drawn
to endless steppes of lichen latched
on lonely rock, fearlessly communing
with an existential sky?
For every place is teeming
with spirals of being,
and where I am without void
I find the rite of dancing,
enjoined ecstatically
in the passion of being amongst it all.
Here, sadness has no home,
as I oust my denial of coiling mystery,
and thus crown to glory the Stirrer
of all sightless cycles of existence
everywhere.
She cleared off her writing desk, jaw clenched with effort, and resented that she should feel so at odds with everything.
“What of the future?” her mind groaned anxiously again.
“Oh, what of it?” she bickered with herself. “That old man? The future, as far as one can foresee, is but the withered end, where all dreams dry up under hungering winds of remembering. The future longs for old ways passed by and lacks all forward drive.”
She felt some cruelty in her judgment, but tempered it with a tithing of pity.
“Only the present moves. It deserves our full focus if we’re to care about navigating it at all.”
Satisfied, she sat deliberately, her desk more enticing now by being bare.
“Tomorrow is silent, only capable of eternal submission. Now is the place from which to rule.”
She set out a book and leafed it to a blank page, then inked a fountain pen with measured movements. All the while she listened carefully to stray thoughts and fragments of feeling. These vagrants rolled through her as morning fog in hilly pastures, so she noted each expression and let them pass.
“Would thee fight flame with a knife?” she wrote neatly, then sighed a blade-crossed breath.
Self-governance required both the servant and the queen, she thought and nodded once, a bow and an order given simultaneously. Then she pursed her lips and gently turned the still-wet page.
Where Spirit Stops 