I see a child playing on the horizon - HAIBUN

Confucius writes: “Great is the sublimity of the creative to which all beings owe their beginning, and which permeates all heaven….” I see a child playing on the horizon. I deeply love this child but wonder why I cannot fully show up when she beckons me to join, be with and play with abandon.

I feel like a desert, a solitary open space with little guidance to fathom, feel and do the ‘right thing.’ The only ‘thing’ that I understand is that nature remains, the olive trees, the baked red soil, the changes of the seasons, the sun by day and the moon by night.

What makes life worth living? I feel deeply disappointed by the interpersonal battle of life, its challenges, and my inability to contemplate what makes life a considerate existence - this life which spirals ‘meaning-making’ in circular patterns of change and poetry.

I wish to be a tree, the ash tree in our backyard deeply rooted in memories of birth and death, standing alone, majestically reaching into the nocturne. The tree moves towards the crescent moon, leaning into the gloaming hour, backlit by the dwindling light of consciousness – a mysterious dialogue with ever-intensifying intimacy.

I had a dream last night. I saw a trillion horses on the horizon galloping in a red-orange mist. There was a chariot in which She, the ultimate woman, the Bone Woman, La Loba, was soaring through the air. I wanted to be there; I wanted to be her; I wanted to be the moon and the sun flirting on the edge of life. I longed to smell the sensuous perfume of the freedom of my soul like all the free butterfly women. I wanted to dance and recite all the verses of the infinite graces bestowed by kindly beings. But I felt like a little girl lost, alone, left behind, abandoned in the beautiful, cruel world I thought was only mine, but then I realised it was not. So I watched and waited for the earth to dream of me standing on the mountaintop, seeing the centre of the world and singing the sacred wordless song of a dwelling, the bare red soil.

I understood that the horses were my intuitive bewildered creations of an elemental fire splattering beautiful orange-red flame tongues onto the horizon. I grasped that it is something in myself that I cannot contain, reach, or control. It is a raging life force. The little girl is the fire that blows new stars into existence. She is the active breath of the planet that enforces life to shimmer in motion. I understood for a moment that I am that breath that we are that breath. I also realised that fire creates and destroys, and I understood that we would live forever as we breathe in the shifting patterns of the wind.

I woke up crying and laughing at the sounds and smells of my home in the vast translucent landscape of my being and becoming. Immersed in the sliver of space-time in the ochre landscape of the Karoo, surrounded by the golden-tipped mountain and the bellowing mud hills - an origami of changing time unfolded into a note from a mother, the Ultimate Mother, who left her child long ago on the edge of the world, inscribed with a particular meaning of being human.

the moon glimmers through

the branches of an ash tree

a flashing flower

A child is on the horizon, inscribed with a particular meaning of being human. The ash tree is her finite earthly home. The moon is her forever-changing lunar light, flashing the way of the flower.