The Swirl

This is a river, and right now the water is swirling fast,
throwing up bubbles and ripples from the future and the past.

I call myself a separate swirl, but the truth is there to see:
the swirl isn’t real at all, it’s just how the water will be.

River’s a river, it flows where it wants and it always stays true,
so why do I sit here obsessing over what it’s supposed to do?

I get caught in these stories, stories of how currents always get tossed,
panicking over old versions of me that were never actually lost.

This thing I call “self”— an anchor on which I have long subsisted—
is just a story I invented, a fiction that never existed.

The feeling feels completely real while I am caught here within,
forgetting that I am the whole river, that was my only real sin.

So let the riddle stay a riddle, let the pie stay in slices,
I don’t need to analyze the current or look for devices.

I’ve trapped myself in “me” and “mine,” in “them” and in “we,”
when all I had to do is drop the oars and just let it be.

Living is dying, and dying is life with each and every breath,
a gentle rise and a gentle fall, untroubled by life or death.

The whole and the none, the sum and the part,
it matters not where it ends, or when it had its start.

The swirl dissolves back into the stream, quiet and still,
perfectly content to let the water run just as it will.

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