It’s the Way It Is

Sharing some thoughts

by

B. B. Wright

The rhythmic sound of the waves lapping against the shore still casts its hypnotic spell upon me.

The ocean’s mist comes to me and stains my soul with its sludge of distorted life and predictable death. Once, my nostrils welcomed the ocean’s unique, defining self but now I shed tears in its passing.

Was it only yesterday when the tide rolled in carrying life’s creations that burrowed and buried their future within the sand and crevice-filled landscape? No, it was not. Now they are relegated to digital books in the halls of learning.

The shore-line stretches its lifeless black snaking ribbon into the distance until it dissolves in the fiery blood of a setting sun.

I breathe deeply, my hugged knees drawn closer, and I let this moment wash over me.

Overhead, the seagulls still call their familiar call, engraved within an aging and precarious time work.

Eternal, night’s layers gently begin to blanket the evening’s cloudless sky; I await night’s ghost-jeweled carpet overhead unfolding.

A school of fish jump in the distance; while a colony of starving seagulls gleefully plot their route.

Upon this hill where I sit, barely a handful of bees—one of life’s essential ingredients—gather the last of their day’s pollen; late in the summer, they are the first I have seen.

This new air fills my lungs. I’ve been told it is refreshing and cleansing. Will my mind and body ever really know? Or will I be lulled by a modern day  magus into accepting it is so?

My pond has run dry not far from where I lie. When did the Whole become infrastructure thoughts and credit-default swaps? Grist to the mill I’ve been sold, where economic efficiency trumps all in its obscurantism and exclusion of everything else. Cost to all and benefit for few, an obdurate mind consciously chooses the equation he used; propagandized within carefully crafted words and images explored, its intent is to unobtrusively bend and reshape my mind-filled spirit for support. I will not.

Night’s carpet is unfolding in the sky; I am lonely among the ghosts. The death of a star heralds its footprint by its light from a deep history millions of light years ago.

My footprint with others are recorded differently on this grain of sand and may never be known.

I root my feet in at the top of the hill and reflectively breathe in this world which I’m part. And I wonder: Are we (figuratively speaking) witnessing the last tree to be felled on Easter Island? A premature death carelessly imposed.

If I am the product of what I was when, then so must be the world’s decision makers.

Can we learn to think differently?

It is already happening.