Changes

There are some changes
that come in life -

sneaking up on you slowly
like the erosion of a hill.

One day you emerge to find
that a path looks strangely new -

somehow the same but different.

You make the turn you have made for
a hundred hundred times only to find
you are not where you think you are.

A rise above
or one path over
you have been fooled by the
subtleties of time and wind,
erosion and movement.

These subtleties are within
as well.  The aging of the spleen
and the thining of the cell wall
show the signs on the earth
to be strangely new, somehow changed.

The quantity of attainment is
just not there.  I don't find
the need to push on ten-thousand
times harder than I might.
I do not need to hike
the whole trail.  I do not need to
plunge into icy waters.
I am not fighting against
some inner goal to beat myself at
my own silly game.

It has changed.  It is the
quality of attainment I now find
need of.  I need to sit at the bottom
of the bluff and soak in the
trout lilies, geranium and solomon's
seal.  I need to lie next to the rushing
waters and eat up the sun on all my
skin as I listen to the pounding rush of
the icy stream.  I need to let the hues
of green against brown change my mood and
infuse my life with that which is
truly robust - the GREATNESS of the woods.
The other of my own self.

It is at that point
that I feel as if
I have been spit up
on land by some great fish;

I am a new man.
The changes have come
to be, old things have
passed away.

Cioa!

tjm+