This meditative essay has been published in MockingOwl Roost (Volume 2, Issue 3: Introspection), and is surely nothing if not introspective. I felt extremely lucky to have found the space inside this discombobulated year to dwell from time to time in a lovely cerebral realm, lofty and light and well above the fog-line, and was happy to be shaping a gauzy blue and silver tissue of ideas in defiance of my off-and-on-again dull fuzzy-headedness. The finished piece feels almost like things I wrote in graduate school, when I was fully in my element.
At some point while sitting a spell, I came across this poem about quiet power that seemed to beautifully sum up the power I was summoning (or hoping to) in my meditations.
The Quiet Power
I walked backwards, against time
and that’s where I caught the moon,
singing at me.
I steeped downwards, into my seat
and that’s where I caught freedom,
waiting for me, like a lilac.
I ended thought, and I ended story.
I stopped designing, and arguing, and
sculpting a happy life.
I didn’t die. I didn’t turn to dust.
Instead I chopped vegetables,
and made a calm lake in me
where the water was clear and sourced and still.
And when the ones I loved came to it,
I had something to give them, and
it offered them a soft road out of pain.
I became beloved.
And I came to know that this was it.
The quiet power.
I could give something mighty, lasting,
that stopped the wheel of chaos,
by tending to the river inside,
keeping the water rich and deep,
keeping a bench for you to visit.
– Tara Mohr
image: Antelope Canyon, Arizona (reminding me as well of the quiet and sacred space—humming with possibility—that has been photographed by Adrian Borda inside cellos)
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