Benign

We live most of the time in the future or the past, fearing the former, regretting the latter.

Only in the momentary lightning flash do we find ourselves in the present, and as soon as it happens, it’s over.

But if you pile up enough of those moments, and riffle them through your consciousness, like a mini flip-book of the mind, the movie begins to emerge and all the excited electrons become a flickering, then wavering, flame.

The Universe and everything in it dances; the heavens open up and you’re drenched.

So, plans change and ambitions reset: instead of the world’s edge, you can ensconce in a parking lot with a roof and that’s plenty, especially given deep-fried pickle slices and spirit animal conjectures.

Unpredictability is a value, (and as armchair quantum physics proposes, probably the way things are anyway), but knowing where you’re headed is a plus, too, for it allows one to travel at their own pace and take detours which offer a view of the neon cartoon futuristic movie set that is our fair city’s skyline viewed from the near north.

Not everything is everything, but everything is something, so there’s that.  Work with what you got, why not?  Live within limits and see that sometimes simply stoking what’s already there and encircling it with fellowship makes for all the heat and light anyone needs at each instant.

And keeps the structure from serious harm, as well! 

The full moon stayed hidden for much of the night but was bright enough on the last leg that a delicate lunar rainbow played the role of celestial lettuce bed or nobleman’s collar, you choose.

Trying to hold onto the few remaining pages of summer is a fool’s errand; you’re either flipping them with regret or flopping them in fear, but when you find that point, right in the middle, balanced on or by two wheels, there’s only the infinite present, forever, eternal, timeless, always still now.