by LJ Frank
Sitting on the side of mountain gazing down at a stream that flows into a sea, while a light mist moves through the trees, I notice a distant dwelling, the architecture of a temple being enveloped in the cloud. The place begins to vanish assuming the mystical form of an apparition, perhaps it didn’t exist after all…until I hear the peal of a gong like reverberation and for a moment look around to see where I am, as if it is all a dream that I left behind years ago.
A wet dust catches my breath and I think of the what ifs of life, the breaking news of my heart, and the incessant talk radio woven with music mixed with squibbing, and now the deus ex machina noise of nationalism over globalism while the oceans continue to rise and the deserts expand…the Earth and its cultures are large when up-close, on foot or at sea…but from a distance another form takes shape.
Up close, culture’s are adorned with ritual and custom, low paying jobs, filled by an educated people who are are critical to an oligarchy world over in the clothing of a representative democracy and autocracies, with variations thereof…a network of internal connections and the ability to manipulate the expressions in the abstract or not, bleeding hues of a different narrative in want…but from the distance of space all is one rock with water covering most of it.
The leaves are beginning to slightly hint of a coloring in the northern climates and the leavings of an autumn cooling once more arrive as the air invigorates the mind, shaking loose the cobwebs of the past while knowing the seasons of nature are not eternal…though they may seem like it within the brevity of a human life…and a sailboat waits for me in the port of my mind.
And I write before I return to dust…and strive to live a life that is a worthy memory causing another to smile….for ultimately one may meditate on the idea that there an intent in the very beginning and if so, was it embedded into cells that ultimately originated in the dust from stars, of which life is an interpretation.