This Poem Wants Attention!

Seeing as this project is semi-regular, I'm about to introduce The Expergefactory's first of a running series; "This Poem Wants Attention".

Occasionally, but not at random, The Expergefactory will feature a poem that has blown your humble expergefactorist's soul wide open - or at the very least, made him think.

The poem 'In the Arc of Your Mallet' by Jalal-Uddin Rumi, translated here by Coleman Barks, is definitely one of the former. It brought me to tears earlier today. Potent shit.

In the Arc of Your Mallet

Don't go anywhere without me.
Let nothing happen in the sky apart from me,
or on the ground, in this world or that world,
without my being in its happening.
Vision, see nothing I don't see.
Language, say nothing.
The way the night knows itself with the moon,
be that with me. Be the rose

nearest to the thorn that I am. 

I want to feel myself in you when you taste food,
in the arc of your mallet when you work,
when you visit friends, when you go
up on the roof by yourself at night. 

There's nothing worse than to walk out along the street
without you. I don't know where I'm going.
You're the road, and the knower of roads,
more than maps, more than love. 

It did it again! Excuse me, and goodnight!

Paying attention to glaciers.

Ah, slow.

Yes, in this day and age, slow is seen as a downer, a problem - a problem to be remedied, a trouble to be overcome.

But I just spent a little over half an hour today watching a glacier.

Now mind you, this particular glacier - although it moved at the traditional pace of it's ancient, gargantuatan, name-deserving cousins - isn't a glassy blue wonder clinging to some dizziness inspiring mountain side or at the head of a fjord in some northern latitude, no. No, this particular glacier was - nay, is - currently sliding off the metal roof at the family home. Although 'creeping' might be the better word.

But it makes you think. There's a real beauty in something like that - a couple of hundred pounds of ice and snow hanging precariously almost two feet over the drop of the eave. You can't hear it, you can barely see it come forward - but it's happening.

Much like so many things in our life, the slow ones are often ignored until the constant, snail-like pace of change amounts to something.

I got cold long before I was ready to leave the view. But then, that's the thing with glaciers - you put so much time in, and yet the moment that it calfs off into the ocean - or plummets off of the roof, as it were - takes but moments.

So although I continue to wait for the fall, and will more than likely miss it, I appreciate the lessons of the roof-glacier creeping, creeping, towards it's necessary end as a growing pile on the lawn.

And in these days of waiting, I see there's so much more to it than that. A time for reflection, a time to reconnect with myself, a time to pay attention to glaciers.