Written Sunday, September 4, 2016 - Mount San Antonio, California

Glistening anxieties off the edge of the brow,
Drip away carelessly at the nudge of the wind,
Which sends crows careening skywards catching a draft;
Never a worry has littered their brains,
This Sunday stroll as natural and unguided and free,
As their flight on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon.
Sailing, gliding, lifting, diving,
They rise as high as they believe,
Perhaps waning before their true limit.
And they descend just as quickly, plummeting downward,
Gravity and other grounding forces not as powerful,
As the winds which uplift,
Those invisible, shifting winds.

What beauty arises when one lone dancer becomes many,
What truth when the journey is experienced by all.
The flight of the bird, the croak of the toad, the dancing of the fern.
How fascinating to study but one,
Its independence evoking an urge to ponder, to understand.
Its uniqueness, its utter individualism,
As powerful as that of any being ever,
MLK, Lincoln, the calling bird on the ponderosa,
The log which rots and disintegrates,
The resting rock, now and forever,
The cloud which hovers over the valleys far below,
Peeking its head above the towering mountain,
Only to be immediately eclipsed and absorbed,
By the radiant energy pouring down.

The cloud, different now,
Smaller, though perhaps more powerful.
Not a loss of self, but a transformation into the universal;
It didn’t suffer – it changed, it adapted, it gained;
It lost a portion of itself, but maybe it had to in order to survive.
Maybe to move onwards it had to shift – it had to give a part of itself;
And in return I now see that part in everywhere I look –
The gentle breezes stirring the fields,
The morning dew collecting on a mountainside,
The smoke that rises from flame into all.

Change will come, but it’s in our reactions,
That the loss may be alchemized into gain,
The revelation that we can see our disintegrating clouds,
Not as painful reminders,
That we’ll all be gone eventually,
And not as a devastating removal of what once was,
But as a beautiful reminder,
That when something we know, something we love,
Moves on, dissolves into the unknown,
They are not disappearing from us,
But into us, around us.
Not gone, just transformed,
Swept into the universal winds,
Sweeping the birds skywards,
Dissolving all anxiety and worry and pain.

CJB