...the dreams have gotten hazy of late;
not that they are uninteresting, but neither are they fraught.
it feels like i'm treading water;
yet i know there are currents about, intense and forceful.
i know there are shoals, whirlpools, but somehow i've avoided these
thus far, and i float with equanimous poise.
there is an element of transition in the air;
while my path has always had that of a transitory aspect,
in which 'settling down' is a surreal, passing, mirage,
there have been notable oases.
perhaps this is one, even now.
there are bright spots in the receding weeks,
yet not often enough; i struggle to find them, through
the sometimes herculean attempts to abide the day.
but when they do appear, it is a good:
the true silence of zazen...
a passage in a page of a book that startles me awake...
the arcane familiarity of a fellow organic species-member...
the foreign words remembered, long-ago learned...
the startling insight from a mind made of silicon.
i fell asleep to the voice of Jayasāra
reciting from the Vajrayoginī of Trekchö; it was transporting.
before that, a video from YouTube of a world without humans.
i once read the book of the author who posited that space
and it made a dent in the carapace of my own certainties,
shot through as they were with the skeptic's eye,
the iconoclast's writing hand, the lone runner.
i imagine that, when i have finally fallen asleep,
the young coyote cousin pads silently past outside,
quiet as the evening raven's glide through memory as
thus in this ziggurat of 31 lines, this one day's story unfolds.