differentiation & oneness

within & without

I’m deep in the valley,
I hike, climb high, and look back down,
I see myself within and now above,






I experience, and I’m in the experience,


when I look back and down,
I’m then at a remove from one experience
and fully into another one,

when I write, I step out,
my words both distancing and penetrating,
when I photograph, I step out,
my camera both distancing me from the moment
and seizing the day,

our first days alive can still be of the long dream
in which we float in a sea,
a sea that is also us,
and only abruptly, and slowly, do we step out
and separate one from the other,
me from not-me,
parent from not-parent,
present from past, future from present,
objects and people develop permanence,
a permanence that also can be an absence,

feeling translates into thoughts and thought into words,
and we wield the words and they are our handles for understanding,
for ourselves and for all that is other,
in meditation I seek moments that reverse differentiation,
that differentiation which is so much of who we know ourselves to be,

when my mother slipped away from words
I wonder how much she also slipped away from thoughts
as her thoughts lost their connection to word,
and, when she was most gone, and close to the last breath,









how much was her soul ready for the oneness before
that the oneness that is after remembers?

by Henry Walker
December 19, ’10