Photo: ‘The Open Center’ by Liselotte Brunner – Pixabay
https://tinyurl.com/yzeqkw3s
BODY-MIND-THOUGHT INTERPLAY…
Imagining sitting in a fifties-diner, next to the table-jukebox… a melodeon of sorts… I might playfully insert mental coins, and push buttons to hear a half-remembered song… maybe catch a mood to carry forward… My mind drifted then to recalling an article written by a friend… He was explaining how our fluid underlining mental-emotional states, or stances, actually shape how we see ourselves and others. Images might float like tunes keyed up by some inner melodeon… we then feel the need to fix or objectify them with our thoughts and stories about our psycho-physical conditions… And in doing so, we then just remember the solidifying stories, and miss the significance of the emotional flow, or fundamental basis of the moment. We tend to skim over the openness and flow at our center, where moods like the weather evolve. We miss the whole of our embodiment, and dwell in the conceptual… Confined in our heads, we feel somehow disconnected to the vitality and richness of the open moment NOW… Ken’s poem doesn’t seem to follow that familiar melody… He seems to be writing a new song in the freedom and depth of the open moment…
MELODEON MONDAY
by Ken McKeon
Nearly a week now after the year’s turn,
And the town remains
Stillness itself,
Hardly any traffic,
No birds to speak of,
The morning light’s
Silent, angular, and spare,
I find myself the reporter of mood and air,
I find myself saying what I see:
Little flecks of rainbows
Float above
The deeply maple kitchen island,
They are the discs dropped in
By the grand jukebox
Of elevated nowhere time,
The multiples of tunes
Are as silent as unseen ancient snows,
And they squawk out as rawly
As just wakened hungry crows,
They are the pink of my fingertips,
The rippling belly folds
Of the stirring day,
They are quite other than I am,
They are turning interpenetrative spheres of time
That volume out
The silence at their core
And the day becomes
Whatever songs there are
That we might wish to sing,
No coin needs dropping,
No charge, no way, that free.
