Meditation of the Morning

The lotus have died, receded to their watery clime of a regenerating sun in mud luck and deciduous fortune. Elsewhere, the renewed spring of greenery and blossoms within the garden borders haven’t fared as well; depressed, in a low slung green of vegetation putrefying under the weight of an unapologetic frost. They return not to a supple hue or texture in the sun, nor do they brown and release their hold in the dipping temperatures of November nights, they just linger in a limbo of being; awaiting, numbing.  On a walk through a churchyard I behold red begonias, winter macerated and pooled upon their sisters; a wax of thinly veiled youth, of blood ties to the mother, of a death and all it has yet to become.  Shadows spin about me, a split second of chill as they black out the sun: vultures.  I rather enjoy watching them wheel and dive on a breezy morning; how warm to the touch their feathers would be: a sun saturated abyss.  Icarus flying too close to the sun, and yet possessing wings incapable of melting.  I think they write poetry in their fluidity, or at the very least lyrics to a song.  They thread words together as their bodies cross and they raise choruses in their heights; percussion and strings and woodwinds.  Some think it odd, inappropriate even, to speak of the beauty of something believed to be ugly, horrid, that monstrosities are just that, monsters.  But who defines a monster?  Who defines beauty?  Who defines purpose?  I took my children to a cemetery and while there I explained to them that it’s not just a final resting place of the deceased, that it’s a garden; of contemplation, of gratitude and surrender, of a terrible beauty and it’s renewal: life.  I study the architecture of the church, the stained glass, and how the crows sit atop the slate roof, cawing out at all who pass; keeping tally or bidding a good day?  God and I made a pact decades ago: we’d believe in the other from within our respective houses of worship.  So when I go to the lotus, when I go to the trees, the mountains, the ocean, when I’m standing in a parking lot or outside of a church, when I’m a spectrum, when I’m faded, when I feel like a ghost to the world, to even myself...I still exist, because somewhere in the immensity of the universe, my mote of self, has someone, something, some energy, believing, knowing, that I am.  I finish my walk, admiring the damage of winter’s encroaching, placing my chilled hands in the pocket of my hoodie, nodding to the crows, as I turn and go with a whispered amen.    

E.A. O'Connell