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.
“Everything as it moves now and then, here and there, makes stops. A bird as it flies stops in one place to make its nest and in another place to rest from its flight. A man when he goes forth stops when he wills. So the god has stopped. The sun, which is so bright and beautiful is one place where he has stopped. The moon, the stars, the wind he has been with. The trees, the animals, are all where he has stopped, and the Indian thinks of these places and sends his prayers to reach where the god has stopped and to win health and blessing.”
-a Dakota chief, quoted in John Grim’s The Shaman
Where Spirit Stops 