Toward the unknown (One Shoot Sunday)
*composed from a photograph of Feininger, Andreas 1906-1999
The journey slices
into our landscape:
masses of time shaped
into probabilities
a curve of doubt teetering
on the side of smoothened mounds
–a solid time our past–
veering off its mirrored likeness
the now
careening to a zipped line
the unseen our eternity.
Our heartbeats stall
among fissures of rock
the chasm in our feelings.
Scarred we cease at thought
–the beat pulses unfeeling.
Our fears swarm as
sounds in our being:
a rhythmic splicing
a phantom hand cutting
in swaths its mode a sharp embrace.
We drive on into the now
to the unknown cruising
the air a fragile silk–
if we could but leap
this landscape among clouds
would be but maps frayed
in the edges as maps to nowhere:
our unknown
the only now we know
is infinity in our journey.
I posted this poem for One Shoot Sunday at the One Stop Poetry blog.
Join us – throw in your verses. Here are the rules (taken directly off their blog):
1. Write a poetic piece & post it on your blog
2. Then let us know about your post. Link back to One Shot
3. Sign up in the Mr Linky list, linking directly to your post, AFTER you’ve posted it.
4. Go visit others who have signed up! Offer support & encouragement. Share your love of words and insight respectfully. Please try to visit as many participating poets as you can. We all could use and appreciate kind feedback.
Nothingness: A Reflection
For this epiphany, I wrote myself a check of $800. What do you think?
I struggle through pain and nothingness with bouts of happiness and calmness of mind everyday. Maybe, I, too, suffer from some kind of mental illness I haven’t dared to find out. What’s certain is my constant search for peace that at times seems to end only for the battle to begin again. Here are some whiffs of calm wind that had helped:
“Restless until my heart rests in thee”, thus, St. Augustine simply puts what ails man. All Truth seems poured into these seven words, truths that Jesus lived and died for. He showed us and taught us what these truths are but why did He seem to make peace such an impossibility, indeed?
Why is life impregnable? Why is living a crucible? Jesus had a consistent answer—because to walk with God, to go home to Him in eternity is to shed the world at every single moment with every thought and every act. Otherwise we, who have wakened to this true path but have not really given in or have not learned to will what God wills or to simply break our will and turn it over to Him, will never find rest.
Until we ‘die to ourselves’ and be nothing in this life, as Jesus says again and again, our journey back home will be wrought with pain. “Die to ourselves”, how do we do that? Not to seek comfort or consolation for what we do, and to deny ourselves of that, which makes us happy (a momentary lift), perhaps? Pain is in the nature of this life, Jesus assured us. If He knew of another way to peace and salvation, being Truth Himself, he would have shown it certainly, shown something else other than having been impoverished, derided, betrayed, and crucified by this world in this existence, this finiteness.
No wonder, as St. Teresa of Avila once chided Jesus in all her humaneness, He had so few friends. Maybe, if we acknowledge our nothingness we could be considered among the few.
Posted in jendireiter.com