Form

WORDS LIKE LIGHT 

Sunday, March 13, 2022

         I have often been needlessly restricted by the concept of ‘form’ – the idea that everything, including me, has a specific material form within which it exists, and beyond which it cannot venture. According to this belief, everything – me, my wife, my desk, my computer, the trees outside, all the stars in the sky – have separate forms which isolate them from each other. Reality, in this view, is a disconnected miscellany of unrelated material ‘things’ – and it’s the view I’ve spent most of my 80 years accepting. Now, however, in the clearness of brand-new old age, I have sometimes been able to see beyond this circumscribed life of forms, and recognize a universe of absolute unity – a universe of no boundaries, and thus no separate forms, and thus no disconnection whatsoever, a universe like a single endless ocean flowing with inseparable togetherness. True, there seem to be distinct and separate forms everywhere – me, you, them, yesterday, tomorrow – but those forms are no more real then the seemingly separate waves in an ocean. All waves are one with the ocean, and all the separate forms we seem to see are one with the single, boundless, and magnificent universe. Like an ocean, all of reality – including us and our troubles – is truly formless, and therefore truly free-flowing – and utterly free. 

FORMATIONS
about Bill M., 87, Blessings, CT, USA

He loves telling Doris at McQuades
about the formations he sees in life. 
While she’s preparing 
unsalted turkey slices for him,
he praises the peaceful configuration 
of meats and cheeses in the case, 
and the way the patterns 
on the store’s floor 
flow together so smoothly. 
When she says,
“Anything else for you, Bill?”
he says the way her words 
are positioned when she speaks 
is beyond beautiful. 
As he says goodbye to Doris,
he guesses the moments of her life 
are aligned as flawlessly
as the stars 
above his  shipshape town 
of Blessings.