For an instant, your world freezes. Everything, even breath, is suspended. Only the mind perceives this pause, identifies it for the phenomenon it is; and what is that? Perhaps it is Infinity. Here is a non-place, a dimension where all is explained and not explained at all.
One is transfixed, uneasy at the list, frightened more the case, helpless in the moment to move. It is real, this non-place within place, but one that cannot be revisited at will. It is the glimpse of an experience of some altered state of being. It is without name, and it is never forgotten. One may receive a lesson there, an insight, a warning, a blessing. It is proof of something, but of what remains cloaked for now.
Those who make this unticketed visit will come to know it as a given, and inevitable fraction of Yes.
Underneath the savory smoke
Determined jasmine extends its reach.
Aroma of meat above hickory chips
Chased by scent elusive as earliest memory.
No food since two days past …
No beauty in half a life.
Say then, which is the more tantalizing:
Taste and fragrance of succulent meat?
Intoxication by perfume impossible to capture?
If a choice, were it the meat, the hungry belly food,
or were it the jasmine and a soul renewed?
Just outside the fence,
kneeling clandestine guest
Eyes, nose, ears, fingers—
suspend all yearning,
step back into the eternal
where grasping relaxes into Joy
Sublime, yielding to nourishment
from the boundless
_____
Suppose that one is grateful for any frozen moment, accepts it without judgment as a rare gift. That acceptance is freedom, surely as smoke rises and scent floats on air, brief yet unending. Nothing is ever lost and nothing kept; in sweet perplexity, it is with us always.
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