Distant thunder: March 31-April 4

A poem

If I wake up in the night, I take this as a numinous sign to contend with a distant thunder.

It’s not sadness, contemplation, more like holding relief like a resting child, in my arms. 

If we look out, we can find the fine line where our eyes meet where the earth begins to curve. 

I am out of the fray for now. There is peace, here, and still how the heart always leaps outward: a unique pain we find in witnessing, watching the reckoning of others, wresting all that’s stored in us, absorbed in the claps of the storm.

“Don’t think too much about it,” probably the best advice coming from the disillusioned with the good intent of being kind. 

It is too much to realize (it being life) how everything is determined by a sequencing of small acts, somewhere in between fate and fluke. 

We aren’t fully in control — the birds are born knowing how to peck through the shell, where to fly next, how to roost in the trees. 

We all reach beginnings and endings where we meet our animal.