Burning A Million Years A Second

Copyright Lance Kinseth, Great Calm, A Soft Bow To The Waters, photograph [from a saunter in the woods behind home after a snowfall, with prayer flags as a gift from Kit Kinseth from her past trek in Nepal], 2012

IN A SOFT BOW, our gratitude outreaches to everything we experience, to the trees and to the river to the sparrows and ants, and to others of our kind.  In a soft bow, our radiant body-mind-spirit comes to consciousness. 

Many are so very fortunate in this moment. 

Sometimes we live and work for the narrow, if not wrong, things.  Sometimes we become so righteous and so intolerant and so misunderstanding of events outside of our immanent surroundings.

Today, 2/9/2012, after a few hours of yoga, after picking up Paige from school, as we walked to the car, we watched a gathering of deer on the hillside by the school.  A small bow of gratitude for such a precious moment.

Sometimes, so much “less” than this moment: a bow while washing dishes, or after using the toilet [similar to Zen monk in Japan], or when becoming aware that we have no toothache or some other painful malady [but instead have peace in that moment], or when drinking a glass of water that is clean, or [if we can even begin to even possibly imagine the working reality of so many human beings in this very moment] in not having to live in a large urban slum where one’s occupation may hinge on searching garbage heaps to collect anything useable [with little hope of any change], including the seemingly unusable yellowed cotton ear swabs or used menstrual tools that someone is willing to pay some small amount when mass quantities of recyclable paper and/or plastic are collected, in order barely sustain a large family at far less than subsistence level [meaning early death for many]:

Still, the real discovery is, perhaps, in realizing that we do not have limits, that we are a miracle and that we live in the belly of an oceanus that is a miracle of ongoing creation, that we are a dust speck on a dust speck in the deep abyss of the universe where deep time is, paradoxically, in each moment:

NO MATTER THE CONDITION OF THE MOMENT,

AGAIN, IN A SOFT BOW, our gratitude outreaches to everything we experience, to the trees and to the river to the sparrows and ants, and to others of our kind.  In a soft bow, our radiant body-mind-spirit comes to consciousness. 

Becoming still and quiet, a wondrous door might open:

BURNING A MILLION YEARS A SECOND

                                     For Shinkichi Takahashi

Billions of years have gone into contriving my ears.

My fingertips are billion-years-old guide dogs.

Each of my in-breaths engulfs at least a galaxy.

I drink and swallow the wave crest of an ocean.

In such luminous moments

I try to compose verse for sparrows and crows.

They are in no hurry

Do not read and live in no time at all.

I try to offer something 

To that terrain where I inescapably reside.

I fold my scrawled papers

And place them under stones and in cracks in bark

And I bow to that longer reach of myself

That is burning a million years a second.

I have come to believe that my very best life

Exists inside chemistries such as those in fallen leaves.

In time given over to sparrows’ chatter or to the trace of ants

Perhaps a door that we have never considered might open.

From Lance Kinseth, The Infinite Reach,

                                    [unpublished verse]