Last night I listened to the peepers celebrate this paradise
to which I came after I'd escaped from almost twenty years of marriage going
down the crude proverbial tubes.
I heard them first in spring of ninety-five and I had never
heard their like before, the chorus of an earth awakening from ice and its
oblivion. They teach a simple lesson though.
The paradise that's lost is never really lost; it's in a
state of limited suspended animation. So when I found this place, an unexceptional
apartment on an antediluvian island in a tidal river valley,
I knew it wasn't just this place that was defining freedom,
but thoughts defining my imprisonment had finally melted away, revealing what
is always here although I had forgotten.
Too often we will move from place to place attempting to
escape a state of consciousness which follows us from place to place, and even waits for us if we enjoy some sweet but short vacation. The irony
is almost tragic.
So when, again, I found this place, I also, by some grace,
had recognized I had to value its reflective qualities allowing me to then
investigate the state of consciousness itself,
as if those peepers in the wetlands looked within,
discovering they're not only of the earth, but they’re the earth itself, and
winter is a season only passing through them.
Paradise, in other words, is not a place. It's what I am,
this consciousness, this space.
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