This is my first official post on Substack. I thought I’d been posting all along, but apparently I’ve been creating ‘notes’ instead of ‘posts’ before now. I’m starting to feel like a boomer.
Calm River
My post’s title is a quote from Theodore Roethke’s poem called Meditation at Oyster River. The full poem is quite long, so I’m quoting the specific excerpt that contains the line:
The self persists like a dying star,
In sleep, afraid. Death’s face rises afresh,
Among the shy beasts — the deer at the salt lick,
The doe, with its sloped shoulders, loping across the highway,
The young snake, poised in green leaves, waiting for its fly,
The hummingbird, whirring from quince blossom to morning-glory —
With these I would be.
And with water: the waves coming forward without cessation,
The waves, altered by sandbars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents,
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water creeping in quietly.
The poet lived from 1908 to 1963, and he wrote this poem around 1960, so a few years before his unexpected death at the age of 55 from a heart attack.
Theodore Roethke's Grave
This excerpt, to me, captures everything that is poignant and transient in life as we’re able to understand it: the desire to live, the unavoidable presence of death, the beauty of sharing the world with other life forms, and with elemental forces. Nature itself serves as a form of meditation on the importance of discovering and maintaining a sense of self. Exploring your psyche is the first step towards self-actualisation.
Buddha Praying Hand
To quote Alan W. Watts: ‘[We] seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time — a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicoloured drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever.’
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