no longer working to get free
(or fix or heal or please)
no longer needing to understand
how any of this is possible
not to mention
knowable
I rest
entirely wrapped
in wonderment
Photo by ml:
A recently completed small work, a candle, my mother’s ashes, a daffodil, an apple and a magic arrow
2021 covid lockdown, Aotearoa New Zealand
337
Jolted from slumber by a crawing crow competing with a kookaburra trio,
I sit in this little tent
watching the sky turn from quiet grey to pearl shot with apricot
The tide rides high, the water gleams like stretched silk
Big fish leap out of their watery homeland, soar into the
dangerously dry habitat of airborne breakfast-morsels
and plop! home again
A pelican floats effortlessly, silently, past my perch,
and more noisily, the motor boats of small-time fishermen go by
And now there’s a deeper thrum, slower and more powerful:
the big yellow fishing boat that went out last evening returns to port,
a dozen seagulls swirling hungrily over its decks
The pelican is oblivious;
diving for some fishy morsel then surfacing,
it throws its huge pink beak open and up, and swoosh, down goes breakfast
In every direction, through every sense-portal,
the unknowable knowingness of awareness spreads itself in lavish abundance
Everything is inside IT and no-thing is outside of IT – oh
193
The brick paving in the little enclosed garden outside the sanctuary is alive with Life. Tiny, tiny toads, about the size of my little finger nail, are doing their thing. How they hop on those barely-there back legs! What power, what precision! What sort of a world is perceived by that minute nervous system?
Suddenly, this is there and that
and ‘I’ is toad toading . . .
Kookaburra starts cackling and breaks the spell;
goes off into great gurgling hoots of kookaburra-speak.
And again, this is there and that
and ‘I’ shakes with the cackles . . .
Life’s the only player here,
living the wild wonderment
of the ten thousand things.
~
echoes from emptiness 