11
Crystalline Confluence
By Zaman Stanizai
A little mountain stream
poised in hesitance
on the cusp of a rocky ledge
to make its first jump
as a waterfall—
beauty fashioning itself
in puritanic liquid
crystalline confluence.
No sooner had this beauty
been brought into existence
before my very eyes
than it went behind
an imperceptible veil,
evading my time-invariable vision.
Mesmerized,
I begged eternity
to own the moment.
Perhaps it did so,
but my perception was locked
in constancy,
unable to slow its pace
to appreciate its splendor.
In that captivating moment,
a troubling awareness
came over me
that shattered the existing reality
in fragile temporality.
The awareness that
time is a constant
only in human perception
as the reality we perceive
in time and space
is but a myth
as now and here
are really nowhere
when spelled together.
Is our reality a myth?
A gentle whisper of Rumi,
that other native of Afghanistan,
confirmed my contention:
“Think beauty…
it’s the web of your being.”
Beauty is mythically divine
when truth is unknowable
and myth is beauty,
earthly and divine.
It is constantly sought,
not only by
this deep red garnet of a human heart
that keeps vigil
in vivacious throbbing
in its dark chambers,
but also by
the wandering mind
where consciousness manifests
rationally as a thought
and intuitively as an instinct
seeking beauty as ‘a hidden treasure.’
In our spiritual and intellectual ventures
in the realm of imagination,
we perceive and create beauty
from the strands of thought
that are buried
in a thick mist of past myths.
As we weave these threads
into our own myths,
we are being woven into them
through icons and insignias
that are destined to become
the cave paintings in distant future.
These icons depict
the clash of our individual identities
with the universal soul.
All the while
the mind ceaselessly harps
on the loose strands of thought,
each pulled
to hold in the grasp of its tension
as much excitement
of the mystification of the visible
as the revelation
of the incomprehensible.
But far beyond the reach of reason
and speculative notion,
our desire for beauty is driven
by the life force of love
that chases zodiac signs
as our celestial animal selves
all over the constellations.
In that holiness of the whole
where we are dwarfed
every step of the way
by the constantly redefined vastness
of the turquoise firmament,
willingness invites us
to whirl with the cosmos
in an endless journey
into timelessness.
In the accelerated tempo
of the universal dance
we realize that mythologically,
and perhaps etymologically,
our dreams come
from drumming
to the music of the inner soul
that resonates
in the rhythmic heartbeat of life.
And in that cosmic carousing,
love, the lover, and the beloved
whirl around beauty
that sometimes reveals all,
like the prospective manifestations
of a lotus,
yet at other times
it is retrospectively secretive
like the petaliferous enfold
in the heart of a rose.
In that efflorescence,
myth,
as our sense of
wonder for the unknown,
often crosses the rainbow bridge
to the undefined otherness
with a yearning
to own it,
to become it,
and to be it.
So,
be
it.
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