Lifespan of the River

Lifetimes are like rivers
Meandering through time
Some seem never ending
Others end entwined
Giving all their life force
To another stream
Who will carry
What it can as far as
Where we cannot dream

The ultimate destination
Is the source or larger plan
We have never been there
Until our sudden end

The deltas are these places
Calm and not as fast
Whether reached in old age
If we haven't diminished
Or run out of our banks
Dispersing all we held as
Silt and sand and slough*

Life is a collection of
What we travel through
What we're still attached to
Sinks before we're done
Servicing another
Or becoming part of mud.

-Kelly Voelker

Slough -

1. 1.

   a swamp.

   • NORTH AMERICAN

     a side channel or inlet, or a natural channel that is only sporadically filled with water.
2. 2.

   a situation characterized by lack of progress or activity.

Delta - "When a river reaches a lake or the sea the water slows down and loses the power to carry sediment . The sediment is dropped at the mouth of the river. Some rivers drop so much sediment that waves and tides can't carry it all away. It builds up in layers forming a delta."

NOTE:  As I think about this, civilization can be thought of as a delta.  The layers and remains of so many lifetimes of effort and best attempts.  A city or a library can even be thought of as a delta.

Oh Magnolia

Oh Magnolia
I've known you through all time
Peeking through as softly
As a rabbit in the vine

If there were a symbol
Fragrance or a touch
Which is all I'd ever
Think or feel or want

It's you who are this
Breathless fresh and dearest
To my oldest heart depth
To my hand so neareth.

-Kelly Voelker

There is No Purpose

Lately a concept has visited me which suggests there is no purpose, and to stop looking for one could be the ace of swords to free the soul and mind.  When I really understand this concept in moments of higher clarity it brings up laughter in me!  Like the joke was on me to think there's purpose, and the whole time there wasn't!

We all eventually accumulate a few things we hold as true, and live by them.  For example, I like to be motivated and inspired by the beauty of nature.  Yet, yesterday while gardening, I realized that nature is disgusting sometimes.  This also brought up laughter from deep within me!

Maybe we simply lock and unlock beliefs when it suits us as a tool to navigate where our secret will is trying to go.  Since our will is secret even to ourselves, it has to trick or train us into doing its bidding.

Another moment I felt laughter well up in me was thinking about cemeteries being a waste of time and effort when put into perspective against reincarnation or even resurrection.  The overwhelming majority of people are forgotten in two generations or less.  Their personalities not known, their habits, their thoughts, their accumulated wisdom gone with them to be recycled into the land and ether.  What is passed on is far from what those who knew them remembered, and so it is all false information which others attempt to keep "alive" for others, when it is dead and lost to the living.

The highest laughter came to me when I was explaining this concept to some friends.  A phrase came out rather by accident that I find hilarious.  It was "our existence doesn't matter".  Meaning our existence or multiple existences on this planet do not matter.  The struggles and triumphs are known only to us and even if written down, they will not be read.  With information streaming faster and faster, no one has the time to care, because they are thinking about their own pointless existence.

I will end this by saying that I have even more laughter rising up from within me about these thoughts and my attempts to bring them to a few people for a few minutes in eternity, only for them to disappear thereafter.  Every person will try a lifetime to find purpose and most won't find the truth that I have found, so I was lucky for a moment, but it doesn't matter.

-Kelly Voelker

I've Become an Equation

Kaleidoscope changes of the familiar
Projecting themselves to the perimeter
Of what one believes to be fake
Beholden then later as a beautiful mosaic
With light shown through images
All different I think
Unimaginable changes I lived like a champ
Now indivisible through fog and now damp
Breaking connections then up from the deep
An intelligence finds me from the bottom of the heap
How did it make it from the cutting room floor?
Why the connection? To settle a score?
I've changed and I've tumbled
Now different in scope
Others remain as they bob in the sea
As if time shifts around them and
They could not change
If Heaven and Earth can't
Then who the hell can?
To maintain identity all of that time
Would exhaust me to boredom
More quickly I'd climb
To get out of, get rid of routine
I've become an equation
Not a prime number same.

-Kelly Voelker

equation - A written representation of a chemical reaction, in which the symbols and amounts of the reactants are separated from those of the products by an equal sign, arrow, or a set of opposing arrows. 

prime number - A prime number is a whole number greater than 1 whose only factors are 1 and itself.

Spring in the Ashes

I was burning papers outside in a burn pile.  I noticed all that remained from the last fire was a metal spring.  I wondered what archaeologists would think if they found this simple element, which really says nothing about the notebook or calendar it bound or what was in the notebook or calendar.  Even at this short time expanse, I cannot say for sure if it means anything at all about the civilization we live in.

Later, I heard on the radio, that nature has very specific proteins to create life, and they look like a spring, and some like a Slinky.  They fold up and will tolerate no imperfections.  At certain points in the life creating process, with their specific perfections in tact, they descend into utter chaos only to emerge with the process more advanced than it was before.

From our limited vantage point, we cannot see or understand most of what is going on to perpetuate our natural world as well as what is living out its existence demolishing what is created.

Our sciences are short sighted without physics, and we lack much of the information to even understand ethics.

Ethics are understood best by allowing a broad breathe of intention to guide us towards higher forms of civilization.  Within this, the strong, targeted will of some will have an effect on the trajectory of ethics, but they are thankfully blind to the coarse of nature's final intended destination.

This destination, is only temporary and will branch out towards other specific directions in the sphere of this dimension, and as a particle of insignificance for the Universe to assimilate.

-Kelly Voelker

Destroying the data of
Irrelevant gain
Leaving the outcome
To wind and then rain

No meaning no order
Just everything same
Reverting to elements
The spring still remains.

-Kelly Voelker