Friday, July 16, 2010

On Wildwood's Edge

Imagine that you have filled a bucket, a wooden bucket, scratched and marked from its frequent uses. You have carried it and filled it with what you could find, dropped into it what you could from your hidden places. The bucket is filled with bits of you – good wishes, pretty smiles, dreams of flowers, sweet memories, and sweat squeezed out by the muscle and bone heat made through your reaching for the ‘might be’s’.

Let all of these offerings gel together, marry their tastes and scents, sparkle in the electricity of potential. Pour the bucket out onto the salt-baked earth at your feet – that circle of earth within your view and purview, your realm of impermanent dominion. Then wait.

Wait because you are spent, because the cause of your pouring out must await its effect. All expectations from the realm of ‘might’ now must suspend and the rule of ‘is’ will enact its certain truths.

In talking to yourself, ask about what you placed in that bucket. Was that all you could find? All that you could spare? Did you hold something back for yourself because you had to or because you were afraid to stand on this baked earth with a bucket and a body now filled with nothing but nothing?

Withholding is itself a cause. Giving, for its part, brings no sure thing. Every precedent ends in its own emptying out and the eventual growth of trees (or not) is well beyond the reach of even your most eager, most extended finger tips.

That fact is an inflexible part of what is.

July 16, 2010