tautology
You travel to distant lands seeking stable truths and mystical philosophies to anchor your mind in the midst of man’s chaos. You believe you can be magically led to the ultimate source of inspiration, that pure, illusive and most distant spring from which you will drink to nullify your own emptiness. You dismiss the exotic in the ordinary, discount your own culture as plain, inadvertently abetting its decline. Blind to the lovely gleam on the varnished floor below your own feet, the surface made lustrous by devoted domestic repetitions, you laud process while secretly lusting after product. Seeking the sacred in otherness, you miss the divine curve of elbow, scent of sun warmed skin, lapis shadow reaching out gracefully from the underbelly of a ripe peach. Claim process as your practice, for if you do not sanctify the daily, you will receive life’s ultimate product – death – with empty hands.
Rosanne Sterne
Reprinted from Divide, Fall 2006
