I imagine beloved, calm breath, drawing a thin peaceful line across the ocean. I must know the truth of who I am and that is enough to uproot my existence. I find limitation in spelling my heart’s calling into distinguished words. What language of the heart surfaces out of the depths of our vocal cords? None, I fear. I invite you to sit quietly by my side and listen to the unspoken. Ask no questions, forfeit your own ideas and perceptions – truly listen and you will understand. If not the course of action, then maybe my longing to be free, my longing to sit on a rock and watch the horizons shift into day and night, contented as my breath comes and goes. It’s so simple I cannot explain.

So there you have the importance I draw from, although I cannot name it. And here you may drop in line with me in some odd and undisrupted support of my quest despite, perhaps not feeling the same trust. And if not, I will with the same conviction pursue my own.

Trust has me turning my head towards it. I lower my gaze. Trust gently lifts my chin. I open my eyes in recognition of that, which has always been here. The recognition reminds me of the milky windows separating light and dark in a small bathroom, in the house where I grew up. There, impermanently painted on the glass stood a figure behind me. We watched each other as we both appeared in the wooden frame. A window into the veiled core of the soul. We met again under unforeseen circumstances years and years later. You were by my side calming my breath, speaking softly, holding my hand like a father as the impending storm drew dark shadows across the canvas. Trust – feeling held. A leisurely dawn smiling, whilst ever so affectionately placing dew drops one by one on the wakening meadows. A caressing brush of fine hairs on an outstretched arm, barely noticeable, only the mistaken whispers of wind, warming, caring, safekeeping the heart.

I do not know what I am doing. It may, after all, be a question unanswered by the mind alone. I sought out resolution, attempted to formulate a plan, to draw out coordinates on a map openly laying on my wooden desk. I mistake my own thoughts for a demanding world, asking proof that indeed I have direction. The touch of trust lingering on my brow has taught me otherwise, to keep focus on my cup of coffee, while the chants in and around me heighten into an uproar. A subtle knowing is my guide.

Life as I have come to know is a brief transmission of colliding stars in quiet space. A relentless force pressing forth the glint on passing waves, bursting mist flickering on trails of sunlight, touching all life form. When I rest within myself, push my elbows against the table and in thoughtless motion lift my cup, I see a coffee stain on a napkin. Only a mark left in short or long attendance of time. I opt to fill mine with the truth.

Caressing the curvature of a ball, the same surface touched by other hands. Imprints of life. The faint hover of a feathery tuft in light of the setting sun withdrawing into the shadows of the mountain. Only a fingertip trailing touch and tuft in slow motion. A shake of the snow globe, another brief appearance, another passing of heartbeats in the casual rise and fall of days upon days. A still guide in the unspeakable transition summoned by the turning planet – itself a seed fluff in the universe. The unrealized end.

Picture animated swallows, their brisk wings flapping. Each flap an offering to time whisking it away into the blue of the sky, where the transpired flaps of birds sit alongside breath and touch of tufts and mountains. Each a shudder, each an affectionate squeeze of existence. Unrestrained, the tiniest stir. Some call it loss, coiling round and round the wrists and palms of men and women. A line pulled wide with an alleged beginning and end. I say: What a passing, what a compelling aliveness in the dying moment, in the elapsing word. Is not loss then the natural progression of all life form oscillating in and out of the heart, urging even the deepest pain into the caring arms of the mother, who bore us? The beginning and the end held by the universe, what absolute and unrestrained love maturing in each simultaneous act of life.

Clouds sow dust across the evening sky. Still wings lurk and listen, while absorbing the residue heat of a summer day on an empty walkway. Tired old wings today pressing against the last hour, slowing only the stir of its own flutter, not of time. Delicate wings on closer look, served in repeated flight and braced for the urgency of strong winds. Folded, swiftly opened, vibrating to the hum of life at drowsy dusk; the name of a pub on Connor Street. A pint a minute contrasts the repetitive yawning of brilliant colors in said hidden fold. Easily missed on a tasteful sip, barely a blink of the eye, butterfly breeding its soul into the charge of night. I sit and watch and watchful too the winged creation, both here in mutual residence of this ever-passing lifetime.

Feathered wings beyond the open door. They too were young once.  A runway for outstretched legs pressing forth. Outbound soar the souls! Hark flight – they dress in dreams, shoulder the world young – carry life full and in your final hour softly cradle death. Nightime carries their immature dreams and houses their fears, overhanging earth’s songs and cries. The passing of city and pasture. Morning, at the windows they turn their heads, faces pressed to thin glass before mother’s call to supper. Innocence is the glue joining feathers. Trust, then the onslaught of energy and direction.

We journey, and with time leaping forward we all step into growing bodies, aging bodies, dying bodies. Flight seamlessly hurries in and out of life.  It’s okay.

Between tiles sits the unseen truth: A subtle space continues the flow of tumbling tiles in quiet presence. Space does not morph into anything other than the all and nothing it unites. It is inconceivable to our rapt attention to only form and movement. A more patient observer, however, will discover that both form and movement originate in space.

The beginning beckons space to reveal the world around us (or space beckons the beginning?). A discovery, which may soon prompt love for the overlooked canvas against which the tiles come to life.

Space is plain. It doesn’t capture the stage in loud fits or screams in tossing colors and whirlwinds of drama. The absence of action and intent is remarkable, foreign to us ever performing beings. We are much like tiles set on a floor waiting impatiently for a push to rock us into motion. Our fall is nothing short of spectacular in our own making, until we lay greedily on the ground awaiting the next push.

I invite space into my sour recognition of tiles leaning into tiles and missing that, which is already here…has always been here, before my wake and after my parting, before youth and after the aged lay on their death beds releasing their last breath into the hold. Space is my hold. A motherly overseer to my being, my fighting, my urging and my soaring. It does not judge my feverish play on this short visit to earth. Ever present and allowing that to happen, which must.

In space I turn to a friend much like the shapeless clouds I pictured as a boy, dragons swooning across the sky. Only now have I come to recognize and embrace space as the friend I feared had abandoned me. I have been blind to the unobtrusive universe in and around me. Waking is opening ones eyes to the world as for the first time, softly smiling, silently knowing.

Ducks in free flight pass before me. Three living creatures with wings , heads and beaks leaning into the wind. Flaps of almost quiet presence, a brief stirring catching my ears, then my eyes. I sigh contentedness and barely stop. We don’t stop. The passing is a page in time, turned quickly.  I wonder where they are heading. And I wonder at their silent interaction. In my mind I freeze them like a still image. Brown feathers. I look too for specks of white and black and blue. Orange the beak and the webbed feet. But the color most intense in my heart is flight and  encounter, shining through me.

I study their bodies and capture details. A sweet holding on: I know it, despite shuning it constantly with little respite in my life. Letting go surfaces like liquid wax, slowly disfiguring a candle, exposing the absence of an image lit brightly. When candles vanish and images become fleeting, when I allow the passing, then three ducks and I briefly brushed this life awake, grazed a strand of hair in the universe and saw the dust lift, then drift back to earth.

Listen, spoke the voice with a quiver. The clouds drew in closer. A tremble gyrating on taut strings. A single note ambushing the whole, loud vastness in one instant. Life arose as darkness shed skin off skin. Pain spooked but oozed out care not unlike the watchful eyes of a father counting the swift and brief touches of stone on water like pulses of love for his son.

The last leap falls silent. Stone slips to the ground, ripples remain. Brief, the sense. The cushioned cloud dispersing in the wake of a skipping stone.

The weight of the hand releasing the stone. The weight of the hand resting on the child’s shoulder. The weighted cloud’s press into thin air. The voice opened and closed liminal space. Brief, it repeated in a whisper, brief…audible enough only to transmit the truth of the incessant coming and going of life.

In muted resolve the sky pastes thick, blue robes against the horizon. The mountains thrust their peaks into the rich blue, where the snow sets a welcomed contrast. Down runs an avalanche in a hurry to rip across steep slopes – a mad rush; from where I stand a quiet parade. I hum Whitman’s words – „all goes onward and outward, nothing collapses“ – and carefully close the window to the world. My gaze is a slow trance, a waltz in time. Outside and inside meet on the face of my blinking shutters. The sun rushes waves through a multitude, gives rise to the avalanche and rests unsettled against my window blinds, begging for entry.

In my hearth I watch another display of heat. A sun basking in strict confines, human inflicted but unquestionably free in its own right. Fire. It punctuates the rhyme of life nurturing me far beyond my body’s call for warmth. It is a gentle touch to my soul, a loving percussion mimicking the care of a mother for her child, a hand-locked cradle in hushed sway. I fold forward and curl into myself to faintly brush the word peace into the ash collecting around my feet. My finger is slick with soot, grey and black remnants of the lick of fire. I spell each letter with slow, monotonous strokes, timeless in their enchantment.

All the while sky has turned to shades of yellow and orange and red, remarking the arrival of night. The dark moves sun’s reach off my window ledge, lets itself in, drapes my shoulders, provides rest and sidles with me to watch the last glints shiver before falling still. The five letter word has long slipped into me or out of me, there is no telling. I doze off before my mind wiggles thoughts into answers.

Poems swirl into my headspace and retrieve my sunken heart. I heed their notion, tapping my brow to drag seamless thoughts into open space, where they disperse silently.

On the back of trusted friends, I find solace as I collect fresh leaves from swollen branches. Like candy, sugar coated doves chase the sun. Bright rays tickle my face, wipe tears from my cheeks just below the rustle of branches.  Movement reverberates through the tree’s core transporting earth’s vibrations from roots to leaves to wide open space. I motion for my own heart to seek the roots of life.

The unclasping of my walls stirs the veins deep reach into the crowns of my fingers. If I were to grow leaves, my skin would lay out soil of lived experiences tugged underneath my chin. I tend to the sky. Growth inches forth as I penetrate the beyond.

My leaves brush your face. A face well known to me. Some speak of maps. I ponder on smiles patiently creasing skin around corners of mouths. One day I will miss your creases and the leaves. Life leads them into the wilderness thoughts cannot attend, men cannot touch, not even the tick of time. I surrender my own inner flow to slip into your wake, where I suppose leaves dance with leaves, coaxing love to reveal itself. Lo and behold, some earth holds us both, I trust.

Feeling into the past, a fragrance of my life, wicked and sweet, fleeting, yet unsettling in one beauty, one worldly encounter, one face of flower fully exposed. I transpire into depths uniting the past with the presence, I cannot tell apart. Whirl and wild leap around the sun, stradling the heat on each lofty stride like the unknown spirits we envisioned, drawing leafs upon naked branches in spring. Each stroke of living truth appears attached to an emotion – loaded moments – pinning my memories to a momentary being.

I stop in my tracks, cannot seize or control, though it is mine alone, it really isn’t. The rays blink my eyes awake. We laugh some, we cry some. None of my strides are lost. I’m counting more and more in the progression of my life. I lean against the haystack or shift my cheeks on the red bench. I sit by the water and stand under the tree, visit Mima, sip the comings of winter, reach the intense, near suffocating energy of spring, hold my own hand – so small – wear time around my beating heart and slow slowly, tilt my neck backwards and smile in the glow of sun and moon and universe.