Movin’ and Shakin’

There’s a whole lotta movin’ and shakin’ goin’ on.

Shaking

The ground of my being is shifting,
A seismology of change,
Quiescent for long periods
Though building power to insist
Upon expression.

As the plate of my past
Confronts the plate of my present
To produce the plate of my future,
Rumbling becomes eruption
Toward the surface of consciousness.

Control
Lies within hidden chambers
Invisible to detection.
Inexorable forces
Aeons in the making,
Now producing
Instant mountains.
- C. Scribner © 2/24/20

How, you might ask, did all this begin? Aeons ago, I answer. Before birth. Before consciousness. Before yesterday. There is only the sense that much of what I think I know is hidden from view. Glimpses of it are afforded to me within and after meditation, and in the process of allowing my fingers to produce words with hardly any effort.

Sometimes there is the sense of looking out through my eyes with the consciousness of my inner self, seeing the material world as the product of the implicit agreement of millions of selves who all want to think of the world as concrete and knowable.

Quantum physics tells us that there is no time and no space; everything is energy. What do we do with that? How can we understand our lives, and the necessity to go and get a quart of milk to have with lunch? The silence answers with a ringing in the ears, the gift of aeons of sensate humans who exist in time simultaneously with us, perhaps in other dimensions? There is much too much to consider consciously. Perhaps that is why just being aware of the need for a quart of milk is so comforting.

Compost takes the detritus of what is no longer needed and transmutes it into something that is nourishing, that will grow what is needed to sustain life. What a miracle, that waste begets growth. How similar to my life is this: that the detritus of my mistakes is fodder for growth. How efficient that nothing is wasted, not even waste.

And so here I am, the sum total of everything that has happened thus far in my life. Those things that I would change if I could; those mistakes that I am unable to rescind; all these I have needed to become who I am now. And I’ve discovered that the me who I am is okay. Or becoming okay, at least, in the process. Sometimes I get a glimmer, a shimmering glimpse, of the opposite of a shadow as it moves past me around the corner. This figure that others have told me I am. I know where she is: I’ve sensed her, within. When I speak with her, she tells me wonderful, wise things, and I know what she knows. Because I am she, who remains discoverable in the quiet times, when I can listen in meditation, and in prayer, I can hear the still, small voice that does not need volume to be heard.

Away from the traffic of the day, silence is full of meaning.