Pondering Desolation

I picture the borderzone as a thinly populated region, indeed as a desert where the wind blows and the sand flies, where the sun stares fiercely down at desolation and the sky at night’s a thick, rich brilliance of stars, but rare indeed the hermit who wanders these wastes and communes with barely visible clumps of dusty vegetation and mosses that, here and there, lend the rocks a somber, greenish hue.

What people want is cures from ills, a job, and help in love relations. Strange theories of origins and soaring speculation, wonder at the meaning of it all—the overwhelming numbers—thus billions of galaxies, and never mind just one of them that holds 200 billion stars like ours—all such things are beyond comprehension and light years distant from the busy brain driving in thick traffic in the morning while it rehearses items on a crowded list of things to do.

Nonetheless—and I look back on quite a crowded life—it seems to me that my passage through its turbulence—the turbidity of pools as ibn el-Arabi once described it—has been greatly blessed by the occasional hour I’ve forced relentless Schedule to yield me for such contemplations. The descent into matter must have been attractive. What did it promise? I do wonder… A resolution of the mysteries--now that I’ve finally reached the basics? Going, I think, in the wrong direction, all the while, in seeking the ultimate answer? What I’ve found, instead, is that in that direction lies the shatter rather than the unity, and that the approach to a kind of silence, symbolized by deserts, empty spaces, and what only seems like desolation produces riches far beyond whatever might be on that shopping list even after I’ve won the lottery, and I don’t mean the ordinary kind. I mean the big one.