Dear Universe
This is to inform you that my lack of attentiveness has not been intentional. Seems I get distracted easily. Perhaps if I extinguished the flames of self-doubt, self-incrimination and self-loathing, I would open my eyes and see the beauty that has always been right in front of me. Easier said than done. Maybe you could just offer a little counsel. If not the why then the how. How to work with the inconsistencies? The day to day vagaries of thought and feeling, loss and loving, being and doing.
I am beginning to see this life…this one life…though there may have been many others, as a patch work quilt. Like the ones my mother used to make. Bless her heart. Hours upon hours, taking the small discarded shreds of cloth and weaving them into a mosaic pattern. What else is there to do, really? Pick up the next piece and keep sewing. Keep linking the ties that bind.
Or this life could be an old pair of jeans, like the ones I wore in the 60s. Thread bare fabric covered with so many patches that the original denim was slowly lost and the patches became the new pants. But patches don’t last either. They become rags or the legs of a stuffed scarecrow. Then the rages of time reduce them into dust and particles. But nothing is lost. Those jeans are still here, still with me. Only the form has changed. I could have inhaled a molecule or two of those patched jeans just a moment ago. Now they are not on me, but a part of me. No wait…those molecules will die their own death and be reborn as a flower or a cactus or that broccoli I ate yesterday. The broccoli I used in a recipe for a casserole. The one that will ultimately be in a soup and frozen and live to feed me another day or return to basics once again only to appear as a home or a tree.
So, what of my suffering? What of my longing for more? More. More. I have trouble pushing back the tide of this oceanic soup of choices and creations. Choices meant to liberate but keeping me glued to this idea of what must be accomplished in the name of progress, or this sojourn will have been fruitless. But how could that be, how could that possibly be. I am. I still breath in the particles of stars of billions of galaxies and I am that. I am that. I am that.
Dear Universe, I am glad we had this little chat.
Awaiting Further Instruction.
by Alan Hundley
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