from THE WORLD IS FULL 

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62.      for Anne      for the mesa       for the Rio Grande and its gorge

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Walk slowly into strong wind. When the wind blows harder, walk slower.

 

All morning, watch the light clean the floor, a clear sweep. Do not second guess your irrational arrangements. They are your liquid, living core. Do not crease or crumple into anyone else’s sense of time. Allow time to find you. Allow it to be slow, erratic, inefficient, wrong. Seek bright depths. The dark depths are known. Do not negotiate.

 

Do not expect language but welcome language, its sensuality and flex, see it ambush and elide matter at once. Approximate the spectrum, violet to violet, black to darker black. Let the photograph fade. All the way to blank. 

 

Tell only those you trust and ought to trust where you are and why. Tell those you trust of your love. Allow wonder to birth forgiveness. Feel the quiet around and within. Allow the hurt to hurt. Don’t try to pretend it doesn’t hurt. It hurts. Allow your own powerlessness.  

 

There is no fixed self. Be unscripted, be unnamed. If a name arrives, greet it. Give it sustenance, breath, sight. Be attentive to the mysteries deeper than fear, the muscular current below the ice. 

 

Ice always melts. Ice is melting. Welcome flux. Allow flux its contradictions, its churn-bred sheen, pale and dense in your palm, born of calm, born of storm, both the opposite of hurry. There is nothing else happening. There is everything else happening. Those two facts resolve in every breath. Every breath, a new prosperity of the unknowable and unknown. 

 

Become the ever-changing sky. Become the edge-strewn pink among the thin aware. Lash yourself to the mast so you can know the storm. Or become unknown by it. 

 

Trace the black hole of memory back to its flaring star. Trace the black hole of consciousness to its present if.  

 

Be the brief fencepost kestrel. Be the rubble pile raven. Be a semiotic siphon. Be the coyote pack’s thin veering voices joined as one at dawn. Be the vastness full of blankness, so much room to be. Be held and free, simultaneously. Be in exchange with material minds.

 

Flex the muscle of presence while allowing for imminent change. Experiment, soft and wide. Resist prediction. Everything will change. 

 

Spot the crescent moon in the bowl of blue. Don’t cling to oblivion, it’ll come anyway. See the night river flowing south. Feel the desert drinking in. Feel wind from the west press clouds against the range. Feel its force move and not move you. Walk the trail that limns the river, a soft-gleaming ribbon. See the river’s crisis, scarcity, fear. See the river’s resilience beyond human notions of time. See the river flow south. Listen to the river’s voice as it’s held by the rocks who both constrain and give passage — hold, guide, hold, allow — feel the wind swell and retreat. Teeter on the sky’s edge, allow the light as home.

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