Late Evening

Late Evening October 21 2010


The sun long gone,

I look outside in pale moon glow,

Cool and clear this autumn eve.

My mind is quiet, lids begin to sag,

The dogs are snoozing at my feet.

I reflect upon this day.

From morning’s struggle to awake,

It blasted off, sweeping me along, entrained

In its breathless rhythm of events –

Meeting, erranding, phoning, working, eating, smiling love.

I feel glad that now,

My breathing slowed to match the gentle canine snores,

I can pause to be, to smile, to pray, to thank –

To feel the joy of living on this splendid earth

And vibrate to the pulse of loving in the great Divine.

Reflection

All of life is vibration – pulsing, moving, changing, harmonizing or maybe clashing. I saw a documentary the other evening, and have been processing it since then. It discussed the role of language in our perceptions of reality. Our Indo- European languages sit atop nouns and their relation to other nouns – people, places, things. Other languages, such as those of some Native Americans express the actions, states, and layers of experiencing. In these languages, the constant multi-dimensional movement of existence stands foremost. Instead of person, time and space, these languages express many other dimensions such as agency, relationship, sequence, rhythms, patterns. They mainly use verbs, juxtaposing and linking them through grammar

. As I was watching the video, I was contemplating the still life of carefully arranged and balanced books arranged on the shelves above the television set. It was an exquisite composition of delicately chosen objects. I was trying to envision not the objects themselves but their whirling molecules, influenced by all those who had made, read, possessed, or moved them at any time and constantly interchanging, repulsing, and merging with each other. It presented a real challenge, because my mind is conditioned -- by my acculturation into an Indo-European language -- to see stasis and objective reality . Both nouns and verbs, of course, possess validity. They just present opposing ways of experiencing life.

 In writing this poem, I tried to “verb” as much as possible – to create an impression, to the extent that I could -- of the perpetual motion that we and our surroundings represent at a non-physical level of existence – the soul-realm.