I often thought of the passing clouds, not with purpose, just the sun swollen clouds gliding along much like the waves aimless play and wash over pebbles lined on beaches. Peaceful strokes of light and dark beating intention with a caring smile, sending it off to sidle with our human minds. I watched these scenes and the entering and exiting of humans on the stage. Men and women, side by side on colorful blankets, closed eyes to the sky, closed lips forming smiles. And children in strollers pushed through my field of view, heeding the playground’s call. The wild chorus of early voices draped in giggles and laughter hooking the attention of their mothers and fathers. The older ones on bikes, later hands dipped in pockets, stealing cigarettes and glances. A row of glasses filled and emptied, there two friends lazily casting fishing rods, here clearing out the remnants of summer, chairs and tables and sticky notes with faded numbers. All the while I keep my watch – idle watch, even so without purpose.

My satisfaction, I cannot spell or hold. I guess it too is a passing cloud and so am I. The absence of purpose adds to the meaning. I say, I am contentedly spectating the play of life before me, in my town, on my streets. In truth, I already miss them: the girl’s greeting eyes unbeknownst to her peeking into my soul, a moment’s recognition, putting a golf ball. But I part well in knowing the clockwork commences without my doing. The clogs of clocks of hands holding hands on blankets and playgrounds, wrapped around clubs and sandwiches, grabbing rails, grabbing life in acts of being here on earth.

The stage empties as darkness lures the folks into their houses. The steady pull of curtains marks my words. Goodbye, I sigh, not without heaviness. The years forged connections into my innermost, although I know too of their forthcoming passing. I part in peace and in trusting the landscape’s perpetual change will continue caressing pebbles on beaches. I heed my own call. Should I return one day the giggles will have eased into mature voices and I will remember the play; a vanishing script. I belong here – still sitting on a hydrant, observant of the world before me, a student once. I hear the invitation I shall not pass.

Bridges draw attention to rounded arches. What feet stroll or pace the brick’s lane stretched across the river? The stone monuments line the lips before the gaping mouths of open gates.  My feet press for rest, stopping in front of a man and a boy standing. The boy balances the moon on his fingertips. The man is in earnest communion with the demanding world. He cannot in this moment remember how he too was a boy once, circling the moon with his fingers, caressing the lantern in the sky with his tips as if luring the celestial body onto himself.

The young lad leans his light weight into his father with caution, knowing not to disturb him in a matter of apparent importance. Seeking physical proximity unspeakable trust offers, the boy waits, silently practiced restraint, all the while rehearsing a soft and commanding look, there Father.

Whispers: Father, you weren’t stone then, today your mind is occupied not your heart, follow me as I point out life, grasp the moon with the entirety of your true nature, sink into the obscure craters and resolve the mysterious play between light and dark by resting in its presence.

——

A muted onlooker to the scene, I am absorbed in my own testament of being present.

My moon, earthly splinter, hugging our circumference, are you witnessing our tiny being? Is my breaking out of my trajectory a visible band cutting through high grass, spelling hieroglyphs into the open sky? Or is it a lone finger tracing stars, beckoning them closer to receive the transmission of my heart’s hunger?

Suspended bullseye marking the colorless canvas, you remind me of my bulbous desk light hanging over me as I sift through work, patiently bearing with me while the room has fallen silent in solidarity with the streets and the neighboring houses. I appreciate you both in your dutiful presence through the night. Then, as sleep dusts my eyes and my head grows heavy, I reach for the switch and announce my parting.

Idly I embrace the moon with the curvature of my pinky, slipping it into my breast pocket, where it beats on to the rhythm of life. Startled now for sleeping and waking serve the same stirring inside of me, I thread my calling from the one source forcefully pressing for freedom. The guided swerves of the needle forfeit security. I stand on the bridge, watchful eyes rolling over the moon, blending the deflected light into my own being. Maturing now, letting go now, just a man, previously a boy, trailed by the moon on the boulevard of life.

My foot pressed against the pedal driving south. When did adulthood inhabit me? My glance into the rear-view mirror is a glance into the past. I sat in the back row, leaning against the door, quiet breath expanding me just noticeable, if not to the obscure passing of nature’s gestures outside my window, then at least to mom and dad.

In the skip of time, I happily watch the rock’s jerking hops on the lake’s surface, sending drops like splinters sprawling. Each hop expelling a year’s energy until finally one day the rock will rest and so will I. Having progressed to the front I scan the road ahead of me. I’m a seasoned driver now. My hands guide the wheel; the rugged leather’s touch to my fingers. What smiling father once sat in my seat observing his sleeping son?

Youth carries its pains. It seems to me such a quick succesion of cumulated experiences and learning. I think now the years themselves lose track of the developing babe through childhood and into adolescence. Should they decide to pause their incessant striving out of the seed’s core, they might capture the lark’s song, the breaking of a voice urging the onset of adulthood into the youthful soul. The same outtake would reveal the infused minds of children with expectations and measures they and others have imposed upon them. In truth there is no pause. The push towards growth is unstoppable: A mad rush to maturity driven by the idea of overcoming society’s fabricated restrictions. And then, as we settle into being adults, we roll down our windows and long to guide our hands through the forceful headwinds of a speeding car, mimicking the arrival and departure of airplanes.

Slipping into the contours of age I stop and step out. The hood of the car breathing off the remnants of the motor’s heat in sync with my own quietening. I am an observer in this day and float my smile around my transformation. I meet my parents in wordless understanding. What treasure this understanding, this silent recognition, this clasping of time and youth in furious passing. What riches lie in the brief, brief touches of rock on water just before each subsequent leap? What dreamlike multitude at the final skip dipping low, never to resurface. What plain golden heart beating through the womb, the toddler, the child, the teen, in its shadows already carrying the elderly, the grey, the dying. Who goes there? Every human, every rock, every glance in the mirror.

I imagine beloved, calm breath, drawing a thin peaceful line across the ocean. I must know the truth of who I am and that is enough to uproot my existence. I find limitation in spelling my heart’s calling into distinguished words. What language of the heart surfaces out of the depths of our vocal cords? None, I fear. I invite you to sit quietly by my side and listen to the unspoken. Ask no questions, forfeit your own ideas and perceptions – truly listen and you will understand. If not the course of action, then maybe my longing to be free, my longing to sit on a rock and watch the horizons shift into day and night, contented as my breath comes and goes. It’s so simple I cannot explain.

So there you have the importance I draw from, although I cannot name it. And here you may drop in line with me in some odd and undisrupted support of my quest despite, perhaps not feeling the same trust. And if not, I will with the same conviction pursue my own.

Trust has me turning my head towards it. I lower my gaze. Trust gently lifts my chin. I open my eyes in recognition of that, which has always been here. The recognition reminds me of the milky windows separating light and dark in a small bathroom, in the house where I grew up. There, impermanently painted on the glass stood a figure behind me. We watched each other as we both appeared in the wooden frame. A window into the veiled core of the soul. We met again under unforeseen circumstances years and years later. You were by my side calming my breath, speaking softly, holding my hand like a father as the impending storm drew dark shadows across the canvas. Trust – feeling held. A leisurely dawn smiling, whilst ever so affectionately placing dew drops one by one on the wakening meadows. A caressing brush of fine hairs on an outstretched arm, barely noticeable, only the mistaken whispers of wind, warming, caring, safekeeping the heart.

I do not know what I am doing. It may, after all, be a question unanswered by the mind alone. I sought out resolution, attempted to formulate a plan, to draw out coordinates on a map openly laying on my wooden desk. I mistake my own thoughts for a demanding world, asking proof that indeed I have direction. The touch of trust lingering on my brow has taught me otherwise, to keep focus on my cup of coffee, while the chants in and around me heighten into an uproar. A subtle knowing is my guide.

Life as I have come to know is a brief transmission of colliding stars in quiet space. A relentless force pressing forth the glint on passing waves, bursting mist flickering on trails of sunlight, touching all life form. When I rest within myself, push my elbows against the table and in thoughtless motion lift my cup, I see a coffee stain on a napkin. Only a mark left in short or long attendance of time. I opt to fill mine with the truth.

Caressing the curvature of a ball, the same surface touched by other hands. Imprints of life. The faint hover of a feathery tuft in light of the setting sun withdrawing into the shadows of the mountain. Only a fingertip trailing touch and tuft in slow motion. A shake of the snow globe, another brief appearance, another passing of heartbeats in the casual rise and fall of days upon days. A still guide in the unspeakable transition summoned by the turning planet – itself a seed fluff in the universe. The unrealized end.

Picture animated swallows, their brisk wings flapping. Each flap an offering to time whisking it away into the blue of the sky, where the transpired flaps of birds sit alongside breath and touch of tufts and mountains. Each a shudder, each an affectionate squeeze of existence. Unrestrained, the tiniest stir. Some call it loss, coiling round and round the wrists and palms of men and women. A line pulled wide with an alleged beginning and end. I say: What a passing, what a compelling aliveness in the dying moment, in the elapsing word. Is not loss then the natural progression of all life form oscillating in and out of the heart, urging even the deepest pain into the caring arms of the mother, who bore us? The beginning and the end held by the universe, what absolute and unrestrained love maturing in each simultaneous act of life.

Clouds sow dust across the evening sky. Still wings lurk and listen, while absorbing the residue heat of a summer’s day on an empty walkway. Tired old wings today press against the last hour, slowing only the stir of its own flutter, not of time. Delicate wings on closer look, served in repeated flight and braced for the urgency of strong winds. Folded, swiftly opened, vibrating to the hum of life at drowsy dusk; the name of a pub on Connor Street. A pint a minute contrasts the repetitive yawning of brilliant colors in said hidden fold. Easily missed on a tasteful sip, barely a blink of the eye, butterfly breeding its soul into the charge of night. I sit and watch and watchful too the winged creation, both here in mutual residence of this ever-passing lifetime.

Feathered wings beyond the open door. They too were young once.  A runway for outstretched legs pressing forth. Outbound soar the souls! Hark flight – they dress in dreams, shoulder the world young – carry life full and in your final hour softly cradle death. Nightime carries their immature dreams and houses their fears, overhanging earth’s songs and cries. The passing of city and pasture. Morning, at the windows they turn their heads, faces pressed to thin glass before mother’s call to supper. Innocence is the glue joining feathers. Trust, then the onslaught of energy and direction.

We journey, and with time leaping forward we all step into growing bodies, aging bodies, dying bodies. Flight seamlessly hurries in and out of life.  It’s okay.

Between tiles sits the unseen truth: A subtle space continues the flow of tumbling tiles in quiet presence. Space does not morph into anything other than the all and nothing it unites. It is inconceivable to our rapt attention to only form and movement. A more patient observer, however, will discover that both form and movement originate in space.

The beginning beckons space to reveal the world around us (or space beckons the beginning?). A discovery, which may soon prompt love for the overlooked canvas against which the tiles come to life.

Space is plain. It doesn’t capture the stage in loud fits or screams in tossing colors and whirlwinds of drama. The absence of action and intent is remarkable, foreign to us ever performing beings. We are much like tiles set on a floor waiting impatiently for a push to rock us into motion. Our fall is nothing short of spectacular in our own making, until we lay greedily on the ground awaiting the next push.

I invite space into my sour recognition of tiles leaning into tiles and missing that, which is already here…has always been here, before my wake and after my parting, before youth and after the aged lay on their death beds releasing their last breath into the hold. Space is my hold. A motherly overseer to my being, my fighting, my urging and my soaring. It does not judge my feverish play on this short visit to earth. Ever present and allowing that to happen, which must.

In space I turn to a friend much like the shapeless clouds I pictured as a boy, dragons swooning across the sky. Only now have I come to recognize and embrace space as the friend I feared had abandoned me. I have been blind to the unobtrusive universe in and around me. Waking is opening ones eyes to the world as for the first time, softly smiling, silently knowing.

Ducks in free flight pass before me. Three living creatures with wings , heads and beaks leaning into the wind. Flaps of almost quiet presence, a brief stirring catching my ears, then my eyes. I sigh contentedness and barely stop. We don’t stop. The passing is a page in time, turned quickly.  I wonder where they are heading. And I wonder at their silent interaction. In my mind I freeze them like a still image. Brown feathers. I look too for specks of white and black and blue. Orange the beak and the webbed feet. But the color most intense in my heart is flight and  encounter, shining through me.

I study their bodies and capture details. A sweet holding on: I know it, despite shuning it constantly with little respite in my life. Letting go surfaces like liquid wax, slowly disfiguring a candle, exposing the absence of an image lit brightly. When candles vanish and images become fleeting, when I allow the passing, then three ducks and I briefly brushed this life awake, grazed a strand of hair in the universe and saw the dust lift, then drift back to earth.

Listen, spoke the voice with a quiver. The clouds drew in closer. A tremble gyrating on taut strings. A single note ambushing the whole, loud vastness in one instant. Life arose as darkness shed skin off skin. Pain spooked but oozed out care not unlike the watchful eyes of a father counting the swift and brief touches of stone on water like pulses of love for his son.

The last leap falls silent. Stone slips to the ground, ripples remain. Brief, the sense. The cushioned cloud dispersing in the wake of a skipping stone.

The weight of the hand releasing the stone. The weight of the hand resting on the child’s shoulder. The weighted cloud’s press into thin air. The voice opened and closed liminal space. Brief, it repeated in a whisper, brief…audible enough only to transmit the truth of the incessant coming and going of life.