Jim Hare classic posts Archives

A More Patient Landscape

Where's the meaning in this life of leisure?
Surely not in applying the same work-a-day $tandard$ to it
As I did in that job, career, and survival quest
That sometimes defied meaning in the past.

Maybe the meaning is in the contemplating...
...was it my true heart that
Arose and set on hopeful horizons through all those years past,
Or did I raise "convenient meanings"
To the lofty heights of credo
And sun myself in compromise
While my restless soul
Hatched serial schemes of success?

Naw, that's the past, let it go.

Those days, life was about finding
Something that eluded me,
That I chased it up into my brain where it is not,
And tried to trap with conviction and reason.
I awarded myself a consolation trophy for trying hard,
And I imagined applause
In order to drown the sound of my own doubt.

I did not find it in thinking or doing,
Or the reading of metaphors in holy books,
Or hearing the words preached by messiahs and saints;
Those messages reached my ear
Like the whispered words of a classmate,
Garbled from the original meaning
Like in a rainy day game of "Gossip".
Even so, I have used the printed commandments
And rules of creeds and dogmas
Like maps to the Hollywood Star's homes,
So I could sit as if in a curb-side bus
Viewing empty mansions with a voyeur's awe.

But now I am on a new terrain that comes with aging,
And a more patient landscape where I can let meaning find me
As the wisdom of age increases,
And skin loses its firmness,
And tattoos become become blurry,
And I can locate, in each ordinary moment and relationship,
A gift of reverence and peace
As I imagine one might find in a cathedral or a meadow.

...That'll do me for now.

Re: A More Patient Landscape

Re: A More Patient Landscape