#13
Yinsanity in the Turning Year

Upriver, past watertrace, beyond the iron steppes of time and their buffetings, the images of our past continue and wait for us. The images are everything we can imagine while our ankles sink in the dirt of necessity -- and now our shinbones. How long will the images wait? For you, just long enough, if you've found the thread that will lead you home. It's needled through your heart, though most don't feel it at first, not until it leads them backward to the doctors and their machines, the experts who find what they look for but not the thread, because the thread is invisible. It traces your footsteps, father and daughter, mother and son, one a knife, the other a seed, each planted just deep enough in the dirt of necessity to grow beyond need. If this sounds like nonsense, ignore it. The sea shrugs its shoulders every day. What does it care that today you button down your life and begin your journey? The weight of the sea compresses our fates, constricts us to our blood with its tiny cathedrals, each filled with the musical breath of God. Down river, at the mountain of seven caves that is your body, silt deposits its mineral memories. December and its smoke say goodbye, see you next year after Whatever Will Come, after days like rivers that sink suddenly into space, cascading into What's Left, goodbye -- and you begin again. What waits for you this year? At the river's edge of the heart, prophets whisper. Where do you think you're going? Like spray from a waterfall, some of us rise while others fall. We enter when we leave. Together, we drift through the antilife full of the East Wind, inspired by the left side of our blood, dressed in windskins of dawn -- together, we float up from the tarpit of dreams as what we really are: vapors, the secret lives of the mineral earth. Our past and its chapters are ash. Only the images continue, far upriver, past watertrace. If we can see that, we stand on cleared ground. The heart has many concerns. This is the deepest.