“So is it study or is it art?”

The first is a wick drawn by a practiced hand, straight through wax. Patience dipped again and again to fill out a candle’s form, layer on layer for length, strength and stability. There is dedication in study, repeated practice like a mantra, mastery a form of devotion. You give yourself and you give your time, your attention. You receive something human-born, earthy, quiet.  

I suggested yet again that our death is introduced when we are born, the seed of our departure planted upon our arrival, and perfect darkness as a backdrop for all the colors and sights and sounds of this little, lovely (hopefully at times seen as lovely) life. Can’t I just hang that one up for once?

No.

I don’t think I was ever one to wade in the shallows; all you need do is raise your eyes once and there it is, the Ocean, and I raised my eyes early. Once you have seen the Ocean, who can look at land the same way, or pretend that only the ankles will get wet, and that there is no danger of drowning?

I haven’t written so many poems. Nor have I penned a single novel, though there is one waiting, and behind that one, who knows?, maybe another. I have been blessed with a few songs. I used to draw well, a lifetime ago. I am responsible for a half-carved Buddha, who patiently waits inside a few inches of wood for some courage and deftness of my hand. I have several recipes I created which really come out well. I was partly responsible for a couple of beautiful kids, who are still beautiful but hardly children anymore.

At first it is a passage of days, and you measure them in days from, your eyes and your heart reaching outward, and the familiar - perhaps the mundane - gently is displaced by the roll of the deck, the expanding horizon, the constancy of the wind, the salt on your lips. Run your tongue gently over the upper lip: it is the taste that lingers from a lover’s skin, when you have left a kiss, it runs in small rivulets from your forehead to your cheek to the lip, it drips in small dewdrops from the tip of your nose, the mist shrouds everything that was your past, and clouds anything that may be your future, covers it all, covers it all in salt.

I don’t seek painful experiences; but pain, and its companion-echo, anguish, find me.

I suppose that, as often as not, this is due to unskillful navigation in the waters of life, whose shoals and reefs demand the best of a master sailor: hard to starboar–! Oh. Get out yer hammers and yer cotton caulking, lads; we’re shippin’ water!

As often as not, no matter of seamanship would have spared me…

The sun’s touch soft today, the air perfumed with sweetest taste of spring, simple, with no effort, the round globe leans toward its lover, longs for love, and every living thing becomes a blossom. I gave myself an hour - no more than an hour was needed - and left my labor to rest, set it on the desk, and stepped out into sun; it was just as I remembered it. The sky soon filled with overcast, the same moist cotton, grayed with pending rain, the same full drops suspended, the hint of ozone and the songs of birds, the motion that is not my own yet part of me, of which I am a part…

I woke before an alarm, like a shorebird stepping in before the wave. That’s more natural: a piper is never caught by the curl. Those winged fingers flit him skyward if the crash and roil of the sea comes too close. He lives on the waters: not in them. He eats what the sea has offered, running along the margin, and the sea always brings enough, if a little, if a lot; always enough for a meal, or the winged fingers reach upward and away.

There are innumerable anecdotes regarding the paradox of the straight line - even modern physics has brought forward a brighter sun, which casts a shadow where Euclid (preferably) would have none. The concept that I am backing into – leaving the paragraph’s position statement back-to-front, and rather than simply telling you what this is all about, suggesting what it is instead, by wandering in oblique circles ‘round the real garden, whose flowers are blooming all over the Universe, while a visitor stands inside-out within a small brick cubicle, before a mind-sized door, holding a mind-sized key (hand won’t tell the mind it’s been there all along, will it?), imagine feeling a visitor in one’s own universe, with the bricks of imagination cemented all about, keeping the garden out of sight – is this: sometimes the easy way is quite the poorest way, however you or others might convince you otherwise.

The moon is overhead and filling every night, so bright the world can’t sleep, but rolls from dusk to dawn, trees and human objects limned by its smiling sight; into its stillness a single person sails, his water the blue-lit road and ship his own two heels. Solitude the hull’s name, it move at peace, guided by the hunter who stands off in the winter sky, by the bright dog at his heel, and the call of the surf that whispers beyond a wave or two of homes. The ship is carried from home to harbor, and at the harbor pause, to wait a while as moon wheels on the tide, to sigh, and there abide.

At a birthday party the other night. A glass of wine, a meal, a toast, easy talk, genial anecdotes, a circle of laughter, good night. Somewhere along the thread of a conversation, one of the party-goers mentioned (wistfully, patiently, perhaps resignedly) that she was wondering when she would find “Mister Right”.

Anyone with some measure of intimacy with their own heart would recognize the source of that comment and, judging the intelligence and sense of the speaker, would guess this wasn’t flippancy, a cliche that echoed some dull ache, but rather carried the volume of sentiment, height, length and depth. The words we use float on the surface; the waters described can be impenetrably profound.