A Dust Mote In A Range Of Mountains
I do not write poetry. My brother wrote poetry. My brother
is gone. Clayton is gone. But like him, I sense the tapestry
of words. My mind works in a slightly different way from his
word filigrees and the spoken unsaid with which he was so clever. The crashing insights, the beautiful thought paintings that he could
evoke with imprecise words... that is not my way.
And we were
very different in many of the common philosophies of everyday life. I was always more, well, brutal. But then he would be ever so
much more conscious of decorum than I would.
There is
one area that fascinated both of us. And here we reached a place
in time and space where one of us would timidly proffer a secret thought,
and the other would pick up on it and add his own secret thought. It eventually came out that the brothers had the same unsubstantiated,
but profoundly held beliefs.
These beliefs, more like a personal
religion, were the single most common ground between my brother and
me.
Perhaps it is hubris, perhaps it is even wrong, to make a
simple synopsis. Yet the very best concepts in the realm of
human understanding lend themselves to (on the surface) very simple
descriptions: The Big Bang. The Golden Rule. Evolution.
So...
from my brother and me:
We agreed that our existence here, in
what we know as Reality, is a tiny, infinitesimal portion of the Whole. (Oh, my... note the odd capitalizations; my brother had his poetic
effect after all.)
Our existence in this world is all that we
can know anything about at this time. Clayton and I both believed
that when we end our existence in this insignificant plane, we all
rejoin the Whole. And that Whole is beyond our presently limited
imagination.
An astronomer once said, “The Universe is not only
stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.” This comes close to the seductively entertaining philosophy that my
brother and I shared. It helps answer why the earnest foolishness
of seances, and the solemn promises of loved ones never seem to work
in the area of someone being contacted from the “other side”.
Picture
this: When we leave this existence, we join one so immensely
superior, so grandly intense and huge, that what we leave behind is
the equivalent of a mote of dust in a mighty range of mountains. It isn’t incapacity, or neglect, or cruelty that stops contact...
it is simply that what we now consider important falls into the category
of a single mote of dust in that mighty mountain range... It is truly
beneath our notice.
Clayton penned a poem that touches the concept. It is entitled:
Listening
No one is building pyramids
anymore,
And all else, too, will return to dust.
The only things that
made our passing here unique,
(If Something ever cares to look again)
Are
the words we wrote,
And the voices that sang them.
Keep writing.
Something
may be listening.
I do not write poetry. My brother wrote
poetry. My brother is no longer here. It is interesting
that I find that in a way, I truly envy him.
