[Image: “Absence,” by Derrick Tyson on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license.)]
From whiskey river:
Sometimes I get mail for people who lived in my home before I did, and sometimes my own body seems like a home through which successive people have passed like tenants, leaving behind memories, habits, scars, skills, and other souvenirs.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
We are not idealized wild things.
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
(Joan Didion [source])
…and:
Standing Alone
Empty skies. And beyond, one hawk.
Between river banks, two white gulls
Drift and flutter. Fit for an easy kill,
To and fro, they follow contentment.Dew shrouds grasses. Spiderwebs are still
Not gathered in. The purpose driving
Heaven become human now, I stand where
Uncounted sorrows begin beginning alone.
(Tu Fu [source])
Not from whiskey river:
Night
1
A crescent moon lulls in clear night.
Half abandoned to sleep, lampwicks char.
Deer wander, uneasy among howling peaks,
And falling leaves startle cicadas.For a moment, I remember the east coast,
Mince treats, a boat out in falling snow…
Tribal songs rifle the stars. Here,
At the edge of heaven, I inhabit my absence.2
Flutes mourn on the city wall. Dusk:
The last birds cross our village graveyard.
And after decades of battle, their war-tax
Taken, people return in deepening night.Trees darken again cliffs. Leaves fall.
The river of stars faintly skirting beyond
Borderlands, I gaze at a tilting Dipper,
A thin moon—and magpies finish with flight.
(Tu Fu [source])
…and:
Awakening, or enlightenment, or liberation is nothing, absolutely nothing other than apperceiving profoundly, deeply, intuitively that what we are — that-which-is-here-now — is the absolute absence of whatever is imaginable or cognizable; which is the same as the absolute presence of the unknowable potentiality.
(Nisargadatta [source])
…and:
Psalm: First, Forgive the Silence
First forgive the silence
That answers prayer,
Then forgive the prayer
That stains the silence.Excuse the absence
That feels like presence,
Then excuse the feeling
That insists on presence.Pardon the delay
Of revelation,
Then ask pardon for revealing
Your impatience.Forgive God
For being only a word,
Then ask God to forgive
The betrayal of language.
(Mark Jarman [source])
…and:
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
(Ferris Bueller [source])
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