Eddy

WORDS LIKE LIGHT 

Wednesday,  January 12, 2022

         I’ve been doing a lot of day-dreaming over the last 80 years, or perhaps I should call it ‘nightmare-ing’: the crazy delusion that I am somehow separate from the rest of reality, that there’s ‘me’ over here, trying desperately to maintain my individual existence, while the rest of the universe is over there, flowing along fairly smoothly without me. It’s like I’m part of an endless and magnificent stream, but trapped beside the bank – an eddy, a circular movement of water counter to the main current, just a small and worried whirlpool beside a river that beautifully rolls along. It’s amazing to me that I’ve been caught in this  day-dream for all these years, seemingly trapped in a small, sidelong swirl in the vast and lovely river of life.           

Well … at the still ripening age of 80, I am now ready to release myself and roll out into the main and infinite flow of the big river! No more whirlpooling for me – no more hanging on for dear life to the side of this river that can roll me into paradise moment after implausible moment. This day, right now at 5:04 a.m., is smoothly flowing along in a steady kind of bliss, a river with no shores, no start, no end, and I am now releasing myself into its peaceful flow. In a wonderful way, after 8 decades, I have awakened, and I’m allowing myself to disappear into the river of life, leaving little, make-believe ‘me’ back in the lonely eddy. I’m finally ‘letting go’ into a resplendent stream I’ve really never known before. And all at the still-evolving age of 80!

Below is a poem I ‘spoke’ into my phone while walking along the Mystic River. I wrote it down when I got home.