We rush towards some destination
looking at where and how.
Scheming after best course, best speed.
Do we ever consider stillness
anything but an impediment?
Calling it the Doldrums?
Thinking only of stagnation,
frustrated desire.
Desire with a target.
Always running away
from where we are.
A man in a boat
in stillness.
Infinity surrounds him,
touching him at every point.
Buoyancy.
That stillness?
Relative.
Movement?
Inescapable.
We cannot perceive,
cannot apprehend it.
Until sensitized by stillness
to the space within the slightest motion.
Interval always dividing.
Integration without integer.
Smooth, never discrete.
The lie to separation.
The poverty of expectation.
Falling into memory.
Running ahead.
Never comprehending the flow.
It,
always here.
Man in a boat
just be.
Lose the distraction of direction
imposed.
Find an awareness of direction
discovered
in stillness.
Slowly turning in the current.
Touched by eddies.
An ocean of air above
a sea of liquid water.
Life in its own rhythms
proliferating at every scale.
Feel the pulse.
Carried by this vessel.
Buoyancy and shelter.
A locus, extension
of our organism’s shell.
Form is here.
It need not be imposed.
Agendas, directions.
Attend
and everything has meaning.
This a foundation,
not a pose.
Bolstered by ocean.
No fantasies of stasis,
solidity, movement stopped,
or started, through an act of will.
We are borne in,
we approach,
stillness.
Motion’s true dynamic,
clear.
Form
embedded in unity.
Just as we are held
within a vessel.
Still,
moving.
Without
preconception.
Floating
on whatever arrives.
03.30.13
Essay, A man in a Boat
Originally published at antoniodiaspoetry.wordpress.com on December 15, 2013.