A wind moved in slow waves across some Iowa cornfields, tassels whispering against a white summer sky.
Heat shimmered above a dirt road as a younger version of myself sat awkwardly on a faded cushion...
Two decades gone in a cornfield sea,
where cicadas clicked in a cracked-gold key,
I folded my limbs, locked ankle to knee,
and turned thoughts to a sacred mantra...
Where crooked pines in salt-spray moan,
I stand by Suruga's surf-smashed shore,
Waves warring with post-industrial waste.
where cicadas clicked in a cracked-gold key,
I folded my limbs, locked ankle to knee,
and turned thoughts to a sacred mantra...
"Pure consciousness? Not pious pap-stuff,Now doubled in years, by bay-winds blown,
Not guru-gloss, nor mind-made chaff..."
Where crooked pines in salt-spray moan,
I stand by Suruga's surf-smashed shore,
Waves warring with post-industrial waste.
"What we witness while walking this earth
has everything to do with awareness
which has no death or birth."
Lex just smiled at the steam’s slow dance, watching vapor veil and glance. "No — it is a doorway," he said, voice low. "A gap where crowded egos cease to chatter. It is a brief jailbreak from the clockwork cage, a margin note on time’s tight page."
Lis leaned in with a tilted grin, soft-voiced but sharp beneath her skin, adding: "That’s one possible answer. Here’s another hypothesis: attention edits the length of our life-stream. Shift consciousness and the texture of time changes. We can stretch the pace of all experience."
Linda laughed, then lightly frowned, fingers drumming a grounded sound. "Nice idea — wrong universe. We’re sequence-sealed from birth to hearse. Cause and chain and change remain; you slow perception, but not time’s actual domain. Time doesn’t pause to be polite."
Ron wrapped his chin in both his hands. “Listen to you — turning minutes into metaphysics. If time is money, you’re both overspending."
A gull squawked outside. No one "won" the argument. Everyone thought they were probably "right." A soft silence settled over the table. The steam from the coffee was gone. The quiet, however, lingered on.