Thursday, May 8, 2014

The Slipstream

JPhoto


It was upon a finely crafted cement bench over looking the stream, which flowed through town that he realized how keenly one had to watch so one would not be fooled. Life is but only a trick. A sleight of hand. An illusion. Turn one way, it unfolds as one experience, or move toward another, and it unfolds differently. Can it be explained away as fate? Or, is free will amiss?

One’s life spans from suffering to pretense to clarity and in between lies nothing filling in the spaces with shards of too much ego, self-importance, illusion, and false belief. Yet, hidden deep within the cracks and crevices of those spaces lives and breaths threads of what is real, defined, and true. But, could it be all one lifelong trick? A summer heat mirage waving in the distance on the empty black top road convincing the mind that there is something out there waiting to be seen, touched or realized, yet never materializing fluttering out of reach very alluring, but once reached understanding that it was never there to begin with. It stays elusive teasing the senses; frustrating your mind.

It was upon that finely crafted cement bench over looking the quiet stream that flowed through the small town that he wondered if we were quietly and subtly shrouded in the dark mystique of self-importance. Have we been fooled by the whispers of special-ness? There lies a hiding place.

Only if we could just get out of our own way in time to prevent injury and collisions.  If one were to quiet the regret, and a need for constant notice, then an understanding may find its way through time and space avoiding the illusions that trick the mind.

It isn’t complicated. Do what is needed to embody calming strength while mixing it with clarity.

Make it happen. Slow can get you there. Watch. See. Do. Is talking overrated? Listen. Think. Act.

Life’s duality is simultaneously real and an illusion. It does happen, yet it has no walls. It exists all around. It can trip you up. Make you fall. Scrape a knee. Slip in a hole. It is all a big trick. Wake up to that and get a hold of it; otherwise, you lose.

The slipstream winds and flows against the forces pushing it back. It finds its way around and through and under the energy created to slow it down altering its inertia. The flow rolls over, side steps, crawls through whatever stands before it as it reaches past wherever it has been. Life has the same forces at play, but they might not be real but the energy one creates in their own mind to try and hold back the forward flow of motion is without question the slipstream in one’s life.

Beneath the frozen ice sheet lives a current of water. It may not be strong, but it flows. The energy of it chips away opening up what is solid carving channels, tunnels, pathways into the mass, cracking it, hollowing it, methodically, altering its changing state allowing one to watch the moving pockets of air inflating tiny cavities, while concurrently the carved path of air slows and closes freezing shut again until it reopens.

That is the slipstream interacting with the natural elusive flow shifting its every moment tricking time and space at every turn. It is all real; but, the constant change is illusionary and real at the same time. Care must be taken to see the trick, the sleight-of-hand made by Nature as we are part of the whole.

(Word Count 595)