A New Pacific Century (from Ribbons of Light)
I.
As the sun sets, golden red, the Pacific’s shimmer promises a resplendent dawn.
The quiet, as a mirror, reflects on ageless hopes and fears, opportunities squandered.
What is it about our dreams, which seem inevitably to lead to nightmares?
Nightmares of history, perturbed and distorted ideas, draperied as progress.
Nightmares of activism, realized as repressions of freedom and liberty.
Nightmares of movements, prisons of the mind, robed as equality and justice.
Nightmares of conformity, in the re-education camps and academic committees.
II.
The theocrats argue and die over the correct way to worship God.
The social engineers fight to make everyone equally subservient and sterile.
The pundits discuss the minutiae of dialog, evading the essence of substance.
Technology advances, aiding and alienating, as wisdom and reflection decline.
Science reveals wondrous unseen worlds and fabrics of a new reality---
even as it participates in the reckless proliferation of hideous weaponry.
In a laboratory, stem cell research promises exponential advance
in the fight against debilitating diseases and the accidents of inheritance.
But, this too is stymied by religious belief systems uninformed by reason,
partisan politics encouraged by a duplicitous media, and the circus of ignorance.
III.
On a mountain summit, living alone, in the silence of meditation,
an eastern monk sees the sun rise over these same Pacific waters.
His only visitor, the sound of light rain settling in the bamboo thicket.
His dreams are of contingency and chance, the inseparable nature
of all that is in life, of life and of the cosmos--- undivided by artificiality.
Artificiality of boundaries, mere categorical perceptions of our limited senses.
Artificiality of perfection, the curious need in humans to ascribe to states of divinity,
which would be sterile, rather than transcendent, void rather fulfilling.
Artificiality of knowledge, the confusion between beliefs, proofs, and experience.
IV.
And as the rain lifts, to greet the shining new day of radiance,
he too reflects on who we are, what we have become, and what we yet may be.
But unlike his counterpart, of the other construct, he sees the wholeness,
more than the parts--- the bewildering array of consciousness’s fragments.
He experiences the web of life and connectedness to the cosmos’ eternity,
the cycle of change, the sanctity of mystery, and the peace of reflection.
He will not advance the state of scientific art, nor master technology’s processes;
but what he may just do, is uncover the essential meaning--- which eludes us all.
© 2005 New Beagle Publishing.
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