A POET'S WALK

Last October... as autumn ebbed away with slight invasions of winter... as a Saturday sun defined a golden afternoon, I meandered through Poet's Walk overlooking the Hudson River where Washington Irving once walked and is said to have been inspired by the distant Catskills to write Rip Van Winkle. It was a perfect autumnal evening with the waning sun settling in the west. Below, the Hudson detailed itself in elegant silence, and clouds interpreted the sky with glowing gestures of drifting calm.

Now in the waning hours of 2017, I walk along the beautiful vistas of Jeju Island, which erupted into being eons ago in the Yellow Sea. Looking north, I know the morning calm of mountains of Korea are somewhere beyond the horizon. To my right, Japan silently waits for my attention, and to my left the vast mystery of China calls me with a voice I remember when I was a child discovering that continent in my father's library.

In some way that I cannot understand, this island has emerged as the center of the universe and my mind leaps light years in all directions. What began as a poet's walk along the Hudson has become a greater walk among the stars. Perhaps the most elegant aspect of the island is the magnificent changing skies providing a panorama of changing cloud-formed constellations. I see the sun painting such bold, and sometimes delicate, streaks of light, igniting a spectrum of colors, never repeating and endlessly changing. At night, dwarfed by the surrounding oceans, the island glows in the moonlight and silence is the music of darkness. And in the silence I hear the music of myself.

AN ERA

Time has a way of continuing to unfold. It is the most compelling dimension we encounter. It is the consequence of of a moment of revelation in awareness ignited with a sense of IS-NESS. We have been trying to understand ourselves in relationship to Being and Time, Time and Being, (as Heidegger framed the dilemma twice in his life).

In eight decades, the procession of events has been defined somewhat angular on what I sensed as an upward trajectory. This metaphor is probably common to us all. Does the trajectory now tail off and curve back toward the earth, or does it continue and escape gravity, spiraling toward unknown destinies?

That is where I am today, as I look to know where Wyzard Ways now wanders, for I sense it more as a wandering than a zooming.  Free of the gravity of my past life, I now float freely toward some unknown destiny. The all sounds much too grand for what emerges as a quiet, more reflective drifting to new ways of BEING and MEANING. 

I look to being in a place where I can comprehend where I have been and what that may actually represent as experience, as a sense of reality. Language begins to fall short of discovery.