The Violet Sky

Buddhist psychology refers to the aggregate of what we call personality as “the five clouds of entanglement.”

But if we are clouds, we are also luminous. Xenophanes, writing at the dawn of Western philosophy, tells us that the stars are actually clouds “ignited by motion,” kindled in their rising and extinguished in their setting, like coals. The sun too is a burning cloud, and as with the stars, each day it’s a different cloud that is set ablaze, for no two suns are the same, though they share in the same flaring grandeur—and this goes on forever because the world is imperishable, without beginning, without end. Herein hovers a magnificent hope: Entangled clouds that we are, sooner or later in our driftings we’re bound to catch fire, become a star or maybe even a sun, and not just for fifteen minutes but for a whole day or night. Every soul is combustible. - John P. O’Grady from Writing on Air, edited by David Rothenberg and Wandee J. Pryor, © 2003 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


The Violet Sky

When the sky colors
the world in violet hue
how can I stand still
beneath the changes?

I know I am far from home,
too far to get back,
cut off from old roots,
new ones not yet grown with you,
I am cold, breathless.

December 8, 2009 8:42 PM