Not Knowing

The summer light has reached it’s peak and begun a slowly increasing descent into night. The warm temperatures and abundant rainfall have provided us with many wonderful meals during the season of abundance. Corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, green peppers, cabbage, potatoes, peaches, berries of all sorts, and much much more has made me aware once again of the good fortune of living a small, rural community surrounded by hardworking growers.

I often think about how little I know. Why I am in the life I am, rather than a child suffering through tragedies, a hungry, homeless person, or a victim of abuse—I do not know.

There is so much in the human language that speaks of things we cannot understand: “Infinity”, “eternity”, “fate”, “luck”, “deity”, “grace”, “galaxy”, “universe”, “immortality”. All attempts to put words on things that are beyond our life experiences to grasp.

I happened to send a friend some scribblings—two poems and one prose piece—that were some of my favorites. As art, they are dull concepts, with little flare or value. But, in a sense, I realized they expressed a central part of what I understand: that humanity is in a state of not knowing the sacred flowing of Earthly life into “eternity”.

Mortality

A songbird’s song
A waterfall’s cascade
A rainbow’s colors
--alchemy of sunlight and raindrops

How sweet to think an unseen rainbow remains
after sun and rain have gone away

Earth

Hurry on past
the bird singing in the tree
Hurry on past
the woods at the end of your street
Hurry on past on a sunny Sunday
morning

Go and worship
a man-god in a man-made temple
Hurry on past
the Deity you wish to meet

The Flowing of Water

In a forest no one has ever seen, a waterfall formed on a twenty foot high rocky ledge. The water cascaded over the rocky wall and fell onto the rocks below. As time passed and seasons came and went a pool formed at the base of the waterfall.

About the waterfall grew tall trees, grass, and moss, all fed by the flowing water. As the years passed the trees died and fell and in their place grew new trees, the children of the children of the trees once living there. Sometimes the falling trees let in the sunshine and in the mist of the falling water a small rainbow formed.

On the ground the rotting trees formed mulch and loan upon which the tiny flowers of spring grew, their scent given to the wind and their nectar to the bees of early spring. During some springs the waters of the falls flowed so heavily that they swept away the flowers, the loam, and the mulch, leaving nothing but the bare, hard rock. In time, other trees fell and formed mulch and loam and flowers again grew in the mists of the flowing water. Again and again heavy waters swept away the loam and flowers and again and again new loam formed.

As the ages passed, the flowing of the water wore down the hard rock wall and dug deeply into the bedrock below. In time there was no more wall, no more rock, no waterfall, rainbow, or flowers. All that was left was a gully and the flowing of water. In the long and full time of the waterfall no person ever tread in the forest surrounding it nor knew of its beauty, perseverance, or death.