Photo courtesy of: ‘Dunes Road’ by Bisley – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/y78ootmh
In this poem, TSK Instructor Ken McKeon got me thinking about opening and also freezing a moment, and what that feels like… freezing is like when I sometime want to hold on tight to something pleasing, or alternatively, I want to hold off for this moment, because I anticipate a coming moment will be awful… something to be avoided at all cost. So I flatten out the fullness of time, stamp it down to keep it from spreading. I do it routinely. Doesn’t’ everyone? But what is lost? On the other hand, when I open time there’s little clamping down on the moment… I just let it rip, with the flow of what arises… an artful wonder, and deep interest in the unfolding.
Could it be the essence of time is a smooth, SLIPPERY, and AROUSING nature? Tarthang Tulku says: “When fully appreciated, Great Time is seen to be a kind of perfectly liquid, lubricious dimension—it is quintessentially ‘slippery’.†My exposure implies time seems to include pleasure, and also pain, and all intermediate experience, with an immeasurable depth. I can move along a frictional and conflicted surface, or sink into varied levels of what is experienced… This is what Ken’s poem does for me… a kind of vehicle that points to the depth and layers of a moment… his moment by the side of a road… and my moment, sitting here at the side of a field…
STASIS
By Ken McKeon
I am parked on the side of an old road,
A clean side, no trash, no slick salty chip bags,
No thrown away beer cans, greasy burger wraps,
Or even greasier empty French fry sacks,
It’s a clear side,
Sand flecked,
Steps away from big sand dunes,
They build up, they fall away,
They are dry breaking waves,
Super slow surf tumbles,
A dry sea, not a dead sea,
Scurrying lizards, wind bobbled creosotes,
Tracings of a sidewinder,
Tracks of a kangaroo mouse,
These two last done under
The vast night’s sweep of stars,
Their streaming clarity,
Chill and eternal,
Boiling with change,
The stunned eyes of a kangaroo mouse,
The fanged flash
Of a striking snake,
I think on that snake’s
Soon to be eyeless skull,
Its long frail tube of fleshless ribs,
Its silenced rattle,
And of the lifting, falling, wave of sand
That snake sideways slid on down
To find the mincing little hopping mouse,
It will topple forever,
It will build as well,
It will never finally fall.
