Untethered

I hold my opinion

As you hold yours:

A collection of ideas

Raised on the twists and turns of our lives:

Individually accrued

And shaped into a weave

That we wear like coat:

A personality,

An identity,

Who we are, perhaps?

Can you be loose

With the luggage of the self,

This weightless stuff

Made of weightless thoughts

And thoughts amalgamated into belief?

How real it appears

How solid it seems

As if the weightless thoughts

And invisible ideas

Made something tangible,

A thing, actually there in the world.

Better to be loose

With opinion.

Better to see it

As merely a point of view

Among eight billion,

No more or less valid

Than the next,

No more or less serious

Or stupid or laughable.

Better it drift off in the wind

Better it evaporate under sunshine

Better it be like a friendly shadow

Whom you love

Despite its ignorance.

Be free unimportant opinion

Who I held so close,

Be free

Here in me,

For I see you small

And light and fragrant

And harmless,

A nothing who might alight

My indifference

And flit there unworried,

Restful for being wholly untethered.

Love Breathes

Love breathes

Its breath

Upon the suffering of man:

A sweat breath

Upon the knots of thought

And tangled emotion;

A fragrant breath

Laced with the ingredients of freedom

And possibilities infinite.

To the prison of locked thought

And tight-chested constriction,

Love melts itself

And all

Into beautiful lubrication,

Absorbs what is not light

Into light’s overwhelming union,

Consumes illusion

And false belief,

Turns mind

To truth,

And flowers in itself

As oneness wholly felt.