Fog glides in on manta ray wings

As I looked out our kitchen window this morning, I thought - that fog did not come in on cat feet. It is not a petite warmth winding through the brush, around maples and oak, padding its way quietly into the world. It is not the kind of fog that can curl in the hollows of the field, crawl along the furrows hunting for mice.

No, this fog has always been here underneath the bright. We nod to each other, old companions. This is the torpor that rises in the dark night and seeps back to steep everything in its melancholy brew.

Now it is raining and with that release, there is hope that the smudge of fog will wash away and we can be briefly new again.

Absence of a Non-omen

I was rushing to an important meeting the other day when I had to swerve around a buck’s head in the middle of the road.

I wondered at the time if I should take it as a sign to reschedule the meeting for a more fortuitous day but I forged on. The meeting went quite well.

Faced with this bit of superstitious dissonance, I had to concede that the scene that I had witnessed earlier was not an omen.

I understand it is likely that the notion of omens originated in order to ascribe significance to the daily brutalities that we witness and cloak anxiety about being swept along in a torrent of meaningless losses.

I recalled this incident as I was thinking about absence as a presence the other day. To define the occurrence as an omen would give it a kind of presence. It seemed that defining it as a non-omen gave it a signifying nod of recognition as well as conceding that it had no meaning, an absence of meaning. The best of both worlds.

I confess. I ascribed it with a non-name to sandbag the torrent of meaninglessness.

I wonder if this reaction emerges from my Western perspective. Is it an uneasiness with what cannot be defined, with the unknown, a discomfort with absence? I think I need to learn the uses of not step by step. I suspect that our consumerist culture indoctrinates us into thinking that all the empty must be filled rather than allowing us to understand its use and its necessity. We are led to believe that the path to contentment is tangible and external. There are never enough things because things are never enough.

Most of us have everything we need and what we seek resides within.

The musk is inside the deer, but the deer does not look for it;

it wanders around looking for grass.

Kabir