drifting, climbing and falling

Drifting, drifting a part of you always feels, paddling in this half-world limbo between dusk and dawn. You cradle the moon that holds and that menaces with its scorpion tale - careful, no sudden movements and always that bit of the madness the why not if it does...

The the moonlight reflects in the waters below. How deep are they, these waters? Who can really see beneath the waves, beneath the darkness and light reflected, stillness and ripples that spread across as you paddle and swim, head above and breath and breath, remember, that part it is important, yes.

There is a kind of calm here too in the stillness, the silence, the familiarity. You close your eyes. Are you tired, exhausted? Is that apathy showing, resignation to the things that cannot be changed? Or is it merely a momentary shutting of the eyelids in preparation for something else? Hard to know anything for sure. The darkness and moonlight are full of illusion, fog that covers and obscures, questions.

There is more, of course, then the Moon, the sound of splashing waves. There is the real world, the world around you that you can see and touch, explore. Here you would climb onto rooftops, work carefully, wielding those tools, building up towards...something.

So many waves here too, of a completely different sort. Invisible waves which fill the air and the sky with signal and knowledge, so much knowledge spread in so intangible a form. Waves and waves that connect you to people in little houses and windows so far away. You spread your own words and find that of others. Speak and listen and learn. How much possibility, opportunity did you gain from those waves, from voices and images broadcast over such distances? Where would you be without them?

A contrast to the moon, to isolation, to meditation with a focus on within. Here is the world, close by even when it is so very far. Here is reaching out and grasping and forcing yourself to learn to do things so you can grasp all that much more. Waves in air - you will never see them, never splash and swim in them and yet...here you are, windows open in a room, listening to a poem recited in another language as you pull cards because it is beautiful, calming.

And farther out still from yourself, from the world around you, there is space, the universe, things so large and so abstract as to be impossible to truly quantify or imagine - for you at least; you will never be a physicist, a mathematician.

Tree trunk and leaves and fire-colored flowers, earth and whimsy, fall through that space, the glittering darkness. You laugh while falling, laugh at all you cannot see and cannot control. What are you falling towards, and does it matter? In a way this space, this absence of, makes all things at once quite close and very far away indeed. Like memory - the smell of jasmine flowers, the little potted plant on your dresser starting to bloom; nostalgia for the bush that grew on the wall of your landlord's courtyard under the hot summer sun, the little boys who tried to sell necklaces and bushels of the plaited, aromatic flowers, "one dinar, one dinar". Close and far, you fall away from things and into other things and you laugh though sometimes, often you land ungracefully, with a thunk, with pain and groans.

Dreams, abstractions, ideas, memories, flights of fancy, carelessness. Which is more overwhelming - to be drifting through waters of you, you, so much you or to plunge downwards through so much vastness, the realization that you are really so very small and there is so much you will never see or know? A matter of perspective as always - you live all three at these at once, every day.