I am made of time
and thought and hunger.
If I could douse the third,
The first two would grow stronger.

Wanderers and fools. The fabric of my people.
Those who leave their homes
for something they can’t describe.
Following a sense—a glow of footsteps set
In places they knew not before that feel of something more.

Spirits of a like, they say, seek out the same retreat,
And by virtue of their instincts alike inevitably meet.
But if we’ve spirits enduring time
Then we’ve traveled here before—
No reason to think the ones we seek
We haven’t journeyed with before.

Perhaps we parted knowingly
On those before known shores
And whispered “luck” in bracing tones
To face the world alone.

For experience, that human angle,
We leapt back into the flow
To think and weep, reflect and sleep,
To seek for something more.

That’s our flaw, you may well know,
To ache for further meaning:
To pass the time we have here now
With our gaze up past the ceiling

Of the circles in which our lives are set;
It’s also our greatest virtue,
Insofar as Aristotle’s definitions can be kept:
That trait intrinsic to the mind as humanity defined.

What matters then, in such a place,
What values must we keep?
Some think survival its own end,
Others pay it little heed.

They focus on less profitable things:
What matter if we lose?
To live with heart embracing others
Seems to them full worth the cost.

Wanderers and fools they are,
For truth they leave their homes,
And give away what comfort lends
Without concern for what is owned.

Though concern they have, well and plenty,
For shattering the ice
That builds up on the restive mind
And seeing through the shards

To shake off convention’s morphine
And question life’s regard
For thought and work, identity,
what compels the social yard—

Because they were once told it’s so
Is not for them enough
To justify the differences, assumptions, and disregard
That places some on pedestals and leaves others breathing hard.

A question in itself, they say,
Is rebellion in true form,
And to question thought of your own cast
Takes work more oft ignored.

But if it’s so that all we have
Is simply passing time,
Before this turning garden casts us
To some more distant clime,

Then what role would you choose to be,
Connected or self-absorbed?
History books cast war as fate,
But the growing mind must wonder:

Is inevitability really to blame
Or the wants of men knowingly sundered?
The values of before return,
And honesty must ask,

Is it justice that the merchants seek
Or profit from destruction’s path?
Can rights be bombed into the world
Or is that just a mask

For string-pullers in lofty seats
Who count our interests last?
Wanderers and fools, they never mind the odds;
They want the truth regardless and will pay with what they are.

If war is just a pastime,
Chosen by those with greed,
These wanderers will seek the voices of the ones left in need;
The fools will stand for hours to demand transparency

And so the battle continues,
An uneven drama felt by the ages,
A matter of schismic values
Tumbling down across the pages.

It’s taken lives and love and loss;
It’s given current aplenty
To the rivers of humanity
That take so long to cross.

To find your feet in this swift flow
Is your one birth-given job,
To recognize what matters
And be more than you were taught

To see our universal breath
And realize the thought
That trivial identities as divisions
Are naught, but near-sighted distractions,

Dishonest to our worth:
With centuries’ unspoken names
How can one be more than earth?
To give way to self-importance would lend only to celestial mirth.

Make peace with being who you are,
And find it not demotion.
Accepting ordinary life gives room for yet another notion:
That everyone holds some importance, none to be dismissed.

Anyone can turn the wheel
On life’s unfolding pattern,
And were you born a different time
You’d find how little it matters

What you think of your influence
Compared to what you’re given,
So grace demands we open our hands
And share what chance has riven.

Wanderers and fools, they always have a corner
In life’s unchanging threads.
To be one is a privilege
I’d not regret to have.

Tell me now, or ask yourself:
Are you in this life because you chose to be?
Or is this just where you fell?

Did you come to this town
with a reason you couldn’t ignore
Or was it where someone else’s cause dropped you before?

When you think of tomorrow,
Is it what’s already been set?
Or did you measure your life and decide what’s direct,

What’s tied to the heart of what you want to be.
If you don’t ask today - not what others expect
But what you in your hours value -

You’ll never touch anything
Beyond plastic security:
Never realize the rough-hewn world

Is lying at your feet.
But only for a moment,
Breath doesn’t last

Fall back on passive thinking, (and)
The timing’s gone past.
And life, that chance to be, is dust you can’t grasp.
.
It’s not an ideal; it’s today, and it’s gone.
What’re you going to do about it?
What *matters*??

Imagine... a leaf, in community on its branch. By connection with the living bark, it knows all that its brothers sense, and all it feels is known. To live is their unspoken challenge, pressing into the space of this material world in geometric, patterned shapes, generating a little more will to reach a little further and sense a little more of life’s interaction. To cease would be to return—from shape into impulse, the will to live, uncloaked from cell and atom.

Then, one day of thousands alike, the push of the wind lifts the branch in tensile motion, and the leaf’s veins break, grown brittle in time. It falls without moment, but its death was sooner still: as soon as those material threads were severed, it lost its thousand senses—those feelings of its brothers. It lost also its purpose in sharing its own sense. On the ground, alone, it faces life without cause.

Having taken form for a goal now erased, it is left to exist without connection to its source of meaning. Still, it may feel. Slowly, it may curl and crumble. What impulses it sends none may hear. Those who could are fallen and far, and perhaps, have forgotten.

When at last it is ground to dust, individualism gained will again be community in loss.

-

There you go, tree. I have written your story.