Atavism

I missed posting Saturday. I went to Calgary for the weekend and left my laptop at home.It was a busy weekend and trying to post under the conditions that existed would have added to the busyness. In a sense, I had a two-day sabbath with time away from the computer.

In retrospect, this poem is about looking for home during sabbath time. It is a place where I am with my self, people I am close to, and things that are important in life. It is a journey back to my roots looking for my whoness and whatness that makes me who and what I am.

On the weekend, people talked about the why and how of life a lot. I consider the why circular suggesting there is an answer to questions about who and what we are. How is a question about constructing something and does not speak to how we are always being and becoming. It is in quiet moments even when we wander, retreat, and get lost that we tap into our essence which is our isness, our whoness and whatness. William Stafford wrote elsewhere about just standing still and listening which is what we have to do to find ourselves.

Sometimes in the open you look up
where birds go by, or just nothing,
and wait. A dim feeling comes
you were like this once, there was air,
and quiet; it was by a lake, or
maybe a river you were alert
as an otter and were suddenly born
like the evening star into wide
still worlds like this one you have found
again, for a moment, in the open.

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of
shadow lead away; a branch waves;
a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its
path. A withheld presence almost
speaks, but then retreats, rustles
a patch of brush. You can feel
the centuries ripple generations
of wandering, discovering, being lost
and found, eating, dying, being born.
A walk through the forest strokes your fur,
the fur you no longer have. And your gaze
down a forest aisle is a strange, long
plunge, dark eyes looking for home.
For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers
wider than your mind, away out over everything.