The Desert of Oz

The Bhagavad Gita tells us that Krishna is all Time, and Time is the great Destroyer, Death, the consumer of all. And, yet, at the same time, Time is the great Creator, Life, that which pervades the Universe. Of course this is not unique to the Gita as it is in many religions, but it happens to be the one on my mind today.

Time is the great Destroyer, the great Creator and the great Healer. At night, as I am reviewing my day, I have a certain mantra-sutra that I say to myself, sometimes many times, until it really sinks in for the day's events.

Part of it deals with the idea that we, as mere mortals, cannot know the extent of our actions, nor can we be in control of the reactions of others to our actions. There are pebbles thrown out there on the cosmic lake, so to speak, that have profound ripples, ripples that may still wrinkle in Time, long after our time is up. And, we cannot know these.

Moreover, what may have seemed great today, may one day be so insignificant in the Future, or perhaps even turn out for the worse. On the contrary, something that may have seemed so wrong, so bad in the Past, might today become our greatest strength. We cannot predict the sands of Time, for unlike a gentle flow through an hourglass, they are more like the swirling sands of the Sahara, dunes shifting and patterns ever changing. For us to try and control that awesome force, that sublime movement, is nothing short of blasphemy to the Universe.

I have learned acceptance about many things in life over the years, and one of them is this, that we can act, and our actions will have re-actions, but once in motion, we must continue to move forward and to learn from those actions, and to impart that wisdom via experience to others around us if possible. The acceptance and surrender to the great dunes of Time's wake is one of the most difficult things for us, as Be-ings concerned with Freewill, to do. It is not necessarily Faith, but perhaps a close cousin.

For, like Ozymandias, what pride may come of our actions, may end in futility, but humility of the bigger picture will never serve you wrong, so long as it is not false humility.

Today, I am reminded of Shelley, who died so young, but whose legacy outlived his own life ten-fold already.

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Re-Generate

There have been many turning points in my life, some that at the Time, seemed for the better, and others, at the Time, seemed for the worse. However, in whichever way we look at things, we end up where we are, for better or for worse. Looking back on the path can cause regret, or perhaps better remorse. To re-gret something is to literally go back to it, but, unless you have a flux capacitator, then at the moment, that’s not possible. However, one can have remorse, or literally a re-chewing of the Past or past events. But, like a stale piece of gum, you can only re-chew something so many times before you need to cast it away.

As I wrote previously, 2013 has begun with a series of challenges, and since that posting, they have continued, to the point that I literally was worn down physically and had to stop a while and look around about what was going on. It was a deep moment of re-flection, but ultimately neither of re-gret nor re-morse, but merely a deep, profoundly deep re-flection.

From that, in what sounds a bit farcical, but for me is very real, I realized also one of the reasons that I do like the BBC series “Doctor Who” so much. Doctor Who has endured over the years numerous re-generations, not re-births so to speak, but literally enters a new generation of Be-ing.

I have felt that many times in my life, and these past two weeks were yet another example for me of such a re-generation, one in which I emerged, almost quite literally with a “new face” as does the Doctor.

Although I have posted this poem once before elsewhere, that was another “Doctor” Fulton, and I keep coming back to this poem, because it speaks to me like no other, and I imagine that if I were to wish an epitaph on any memorial, I would request to have this poem engraved as such.

Again, for me, there is no poem greater in my Life than Wallace Stevens’s

“The Poem That Took the Place of A Mountain”

There it was, word for word,

The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,

Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed

A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,

Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,

Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness

Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,

Recognize his unique and solitary home.

Wallace Stevens