mount bromo, java timur, january twenty-four
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carnet javanais
awakening to emergence of light / smoke spewing from the sleepless heart of the volcano / this precipice like the sea of sand we passed to reach this point is moving too / groundless yet steady / what is inside and what outside shift and drift freely and without direction / let the wonder decide what is still you and what in you continues unremembered along pathways opened by the early morning breeze / as you stand here or there or anywhere embosomed by mountains /
how do you call this world fleeting if fleeting is all that it knows / in its fleetingness though is a stayingness / of this clouds are a reminder ceaselessly as they err /
the fleeting stays while the knowing goes / no knower to be found before or after the knowing / knower never do you get to know what is certain as the unknown is the cusp where you are building your home / in the ebb and flow of the sea you do not know who comes who and goes /
we are part froth part remembrance of a shimmering surface that mirrors blues of unstirred depths of stillness as it moves / neither wave nor ocean yet to be the breath that in silence carries both /
the questing the finding / coming to quest what is always here and being here already found / finding what was never lost / long the gap between the two in this briefest of journeys / the wild landscape of a longing called life / returning unnamed and uncalled to no one's death / here is where you disappear your travels before you / what receives you has or never will leave your side / openness openness is what we are / where we come from and where we go / each treading tracelessly the path of a dream / and yet before and after the last word there is reverence /