A quest for stasis
Amidst the unrelenting flux.
Ought I to pursue permanence
In the face of inevitable revolution?
Or must I cede to the torrid blaze,
Yield to the detritus and decay,
Surrender to the somnolence and silence,
And act as though some fleeting verdant renaissance,
Forms adequate compensation
For the impending gusts of change?
“The Earth, as you know, has spun and will spin.
For rotation makes our whole world go round.
Life wouldn’t be life—no—couldn’t be life,
If seasons were not to be found.”
Seasons.
An inherent slice of life,
Or so I’m informed,
By strangers and friends,
Who mistake wit for wisdom,
Forgetting their experience is theirs alone.
Perchance this point of momentum and spin,
Holds merit enough for some,
But nevertheless, I can’t help but feel
Unsated by the ease of your submission.
Indeed Earth does rotate and revolve,
In a most obstinate way.
The least She could offer, If She must spin at all,
Is ensure that She spins around me.
As if on cue, they emerge.
A simper. A smirk. An emphatic eye roll.
“A trial of utter futility…”
One attempts to explain,
Dripping with viscous condescension.
They can’t sense it.
The fatal lability of life.
The comfort offered by the constant.
The safety and security in the same.
“While seasons may come and seasons may go,
Much like tenants on a whirlwind tour,
After some time, you’ll begin to remark,
That each year they’re the same, for sure.”
The same…
One might suspend reality for a moment,
To consider them familiar…
Similar perhaps.
But identical?
At best, they may share,
From year to year, an acquainted air;
Dragging bleached nostalgia in their wake,
Black and white fragments of cake
From celebrations past.
Dredging tunes we only faintly recollect,
As we stumble through dust-ridden archives
Of words we forget.
Ponder on autumn, consider the fall.
Leaves pilgrimage south each year,
Migrating through gradients,
Ritual shades of life,
Tones of warmth, hues of earth;
All before they embark.
But is their route ever the same?
At times the path is smooth and straight,
Gliding to the ground.
Sometimes, they expertly surf the breeze
Over a neighbour’s fence.
On occasion, a gale rends them from home
Before their belongings are packed.
Vanishing suddenly we question the fact
That they were once there at all.
Sense the soil beneath.
Send down roots, for without it
There exists no hope
Of raising our face to the sun.
It may be simple. Innate. Ingrained.
But every season since I can recall,
Of being uprooted by tempest and squall,
Has only served to persuade
Of the vanity of it all…
Is it truly so wrong to long for
Evergreens, perennials and permafrost?
Hindsight.
Vivid—as if it were yesterday.
Tainted by deracination,
Those countless years ago.
The inane, rehearsed answers to
Questions were my sole constant companion,
Bleeding through wounds of displacement.
And though trite it might seem,
A quick glance behind,
Serves well to remind:
Only by weathering the seasons,
Did our answers—staggering—arrive.
Are we wrong to yearn for steadfast existence?
No; not dishonest, misguided.
It’s only natural to seek perennials
In gardens filled with ephemerals.
But an ever-vigilant search,
For evergreens might
Form a low, suffocating canopy.
In trellis prisons we cocoon ourselves,
Forgetting room needed to grow.
It’s certainly not an original thought (if such a thing even exists),
But it attests my story—
Our history—
Your present and moments to come.
A wise man once penned that a season exists
For every thing, time and purpose under the sun…
Moments of loss and moments of life,
Phases of harm and of healing,
Times of decay and of edification,
Eras of sorrow or mirth.
Autumns of grief and of solace,
Winter’s misery frozen in solstice,
Summers of desertion and those of adoption,
Spring’s cutting silence; words that speak life.
Seasons of war, and those of peace.
Chapters of hate and of love.
I know that of late, each season
Presents itself as the former,
To pummel with precipitation,
Or threaten none at all,
Until you arrive at Apathy’s field
And forget why you bother to stand.
But I promise that drought will subside to
Reaping the harvests in store.
There’s no doubt it oft will prove arduous,
To seize reason behind every season,
But when buffeted from all around,
Strain, endure, stand your ground.
And of even greater import,
When a lull arrives (and it will),
Scramble forward, dauntless,
Each stumble a chance
To move past familiarity.
Beyond that distant horizon of comfort,
Lie fragments of self, clandestine;
The rungs of a ladder
That carries you from
Your present to my today.
And while you weather the seasons,
Through erratic years to come,
You do still have one constant,
In whose arms, no longer numb
You’ll thaw and sense His presence
Unchanging through the ages,
From first dawn to final dusk.
I found my stasis
Amongst all the flux and flow.
God immutable.
POET: Joel Raymond, Wahroonga SDA church in Sydney.