The Sphinx 2

The sphinx has seen them come and go. The strong and the wrong, the wise and the wicked, the haughty and the lowly. She has seen elegant structures and torrents of chaos. Great swirling embers of power, and heart, and loss. She has stood both outside the gate and inside the gate, and found them to be the same place. The sphinx has endured the chattering sandstorms of the ages, and has remained unmoved. In her defense, it must be noted that she is made of 270 tons of stone. The sphinx is mostly sedentary.

The sphinx has lived through alphabets and minarets, prophets and parapets; she has emerged smoothened and wizened and so free of fear. She has eaten the choking dust of memory and been fed. She has seen breadths of time lap against impossibly distant shores and even still, she has not yet seen everything. Why is there always something new? What fresh momentum moves these crossing currents, turns these driving wheels, dances these many, many feet?

It's worth considering that the sphinx may not know. Her tears are long dried, baking daily in the punishing heat. For all her years, what has she accrued beyond survey? Her untold wrinkles are untelling. What has she seen but the sights? The world is set in motion, adrift but alight, and our human countless nows weigh nothing.

Our time is weightless but our actions have force. We can run circles around the sphinx, but we can also run forward. Run ecstatic, run through the gates, run in time as though time could never catch up. No, the sphinx does not know. She will never blink or lift a paw. We are the ones, the sands that blow, and breathe, and build.

Profiles in Letting Go

You sit there, in a rare moment of sitting there, looking out the windows and watching the sun dodge behind drifting clouds. You sit there, watching, wondering how it is all going to turn out. Maybe it will never turn out. Perhaps it already has. What is this phrase – "turn out?"

You stand at the top of a long hill and instead of walking down it (and certainly instead of rolling), you walk further along its ridge. From here you can see the town, and the town behind the town, and the steeples of towns that aren't even any of those towns. From this land's shoulder, stray beams of sunlight illuminate patches of somewhere, nowhere. All of this, and you are the figure on the ridge, someone else's epiphany.

In Japan, December is the bounenkai season, or the "Forget-The-Year-Party." Alcohol is an excellent amnesiatic agent, so you see many drunk people on the street on Japanese December nights. Me, I prefer the classic flowerpot-
dropped-on-the-head method of forgetting, but this is not always practical, especially in a Northern climate.

Then there is the King who was crowned Master of All He Sees. Turns out it was a curse as well, because every time he blinked, chaos took a step closer. He tried not to blink, but his eyes dried out and soon he had more than made up for the not blinking. In time of course, he grew tired in his vigilance and fell deeply asleep, where he became master of nothing. Well, perhaps of his dreams, we don't know, he's not a king anymore.

You soar across this bountiful land. You soar across oxbow lakes and skewbald fields, past the ring road and the warehouses, over the neighbors and their fences, joined together on this land. You soar as an angel, ministering shared concern and individual outcome, a siren without a name. You braid these concerns into a heavenly rope. You soar ever higher, past the airplanes and the oxygen, past the questions and the answers, past the moment into no moment, into a peace that is all that peace is. Yet, from the ground you can see that far. You soar.

peace to you
from all of us

"spoke"

A meditation on faith, not exactly for the E79FF07. File under Oswald Wang.