Mind

I am in the garden, listening for thoughts to be able to tell you what it is like. It’s different than you imagine; not at all what we have been taught.

Spider teaches me to weave a web; a perfect geometry of proportion, symmetry and depth. It is spun of the substance of my own soul. I sit inside this translucent architecture and wait. Spider Grandmother and I ~ old beyond time ~ we fish in the currents of earth’s breath, the mind of god. Our nets billow in life’s breeze as shoals of thoughts, schools of ideas swim in their organic choreography of One.

We are designed to wait and breathe, to ride the currents of wind. Here is the breeze of a hummingbird’s wing, and here the wind of sycamore’s respiration. Words come floating by. I catch one, gaze and turn it over, sniff and taste. Is this a messenger true enough to slip through the barbarian’s mine field, between the weapons of mass distraction aimed at a 21st century mind? I wrap each word in silk, so, when strung together they will be prayer beads. I hand this living rosary to you. May each word-being open and its foliated perfume call to you: Step out of the mausoleum of concepts and into the living mind of the forest.

What I am trying to say is mind does not live inside human heads; mind is a quality of the living earth. The square walls of your room, the linear streets of our concrete cities breed thoughts that bump into corners, tangle at crossroads and crash. They are thoughts contained, constrained, tamed.

Step into the garden with me. Fish in the generous breath of life and understand mind anew.

More poems and wondering in my book A Litany of Wild Graces. See it at sharifaoppenheimer.org. Order at Bookshop.org.

Photo: Pixnio