“Climb the mountain not to plant your flag, but to embrace the challenge, enjoy the air and behold the view. Climb it so you can see the world, not so the world can see you.” ~ David McCullough, modern-day English teacher
Life is not a pageant. And yet we unabashedly tuck this gloriously divine journey and spontaneously shared experience into a flippant 4-letter word and dress it up like a calamatied, desperate, purpose-less reality star who ultimately exploits and extinguishes her own value. Life is not charading parade of nipped and tucked excuses of beauty…of average activities reupholstered to elicit wooing and swooning in hopes of earning awards no more valuable or necessary than a 14 carat gold tombstone. Life is not a calling to exhibit one’s presumed importance for awe’s sake of our 7 billion relatives. For life is LIFE. It’s like light and air and thoughts and bodies… it’s just there. And we all have IT… for some time. And no one’s is more important. For we are all but a sum of parts playing on a gameboard on an unpretentious planet… and when one piece gets taken away, the game still goes on.
And so, perhaps life is like a poetry slam, or so I humbly reflect. A dedicated effort of an affected orator striving to breathe life into the written word with emphatic, emoting performance that eggs both speaker and audience to tug the air for more oxygen and the room for more space and actions for more meaning. Life is emulated by the aerobic effort required by this act of igniting possibilities into a kinetic energy that spills on and rips through every thread of those in the same circling space. And yet the expansion of meaning in the mutterings from muted paper are mere reflections of the challenges of the poet himself. Though he stands upon a stage, he knows his spectators ironically watch themselves shift under influence, and he is without need of approval. For the poet alone strives to make it to the top of a metaphorical mountain…but for the experience alone of seeing a new view revealed upon his last breath into the last particle of punctuation. Breath to thoughts to words to actions to breath again… and then another upward hike to enlightenment. Unstaged life unfolding. ~ KD
Copyright by Kimberlie Dykeman.
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