Looking back over the past few years — the suffocating wildfires and the Covid-19 pandemic — I marvel at the difference that has taken place in terms of my involvement in and passion for seeking out my feelings and creating poetry that might express what I am thinking and feeling. For attempting to see the world from my own viewpoint, rather than relying on the opinions of others.
I think that I am changing. Finding a different focus? Feeling less threatened, perhaps, by the thought of running out of time to do what I have thought was important. But life isn’t like that. It ends when it ends, and what I have done is what I have accomplished. What I have not accomplished, no longer relevant. The world goes on without me, and my “space” fades and disappears as people whose lives I have shared adapt and continue…and the same for each of us in turn. I am not at the center of my world.
The ripples that are now in the stream fade away as the water flows on and mingles with other ripples and currents. Made by Nature or Other or competing forces. The present and the future make their own realities as they travel their own paths. And those paths may end. And it will not be because of anything I have said or done…or because of who or what I am, whoever that might have been or as perceived through others’ senses and minds.
The future will create itself. And I will be…whoever or whatever one becomes as the materials that now constitute myself become other and reform into many other shapes and forms, living things or inert. Detached and reused in their turn. Erosion, regrowth, or nothing at all. Or from stardust to stardust once again.
I think I will take some photographs, tomorrow, and write more poems. Warm-up for National Haiku Writing Month, come February.
