Smoking My Pipe

Watching the plume of steam

Rise through the sunbeam,

Seemingly searing the frosty fence,

That brings to mind the sugared pastry lattice atop a pie;

I wonder if someone is stood the other side,

Smoking a pipe,

As am I.

A foraging blackbird finds a worm,

Which finds in turn

That it cannot wriggle free from fate.

Soon the worm will turn;

Into the bird and its droppings,

Potentially ‘pon my pate.

Throughout all time,

Does anyone lament the change of state

Of water from ice to steam?

Does anyone cry

At the plight of a worm soon late?

Whether flowing or frozen, wriggling or eaten,

There's no emotion invested in water or worms.

There’s no attachment,

No made up meaning.

It's just stuff,

Happening.

Condensation trails aeroplanes,

Momentarily cutting,

Before quickly dissolving

Into the crisp, bright, blue, winter morning sky.

The seemingly eternal sun illuminating all,

Playing I spy with my massive eye.

Oh the hubris of the mind,

Judging the passing of time.

Momentarily? Quickly?

Seemingly eternal?

Seemingly unable is the mind

To know what is from what seems.

For in the context of eternity,

The sun, like the contrail,

Is but a momentary cutting of the sky.

Like all material form,

It is born, and it dies.

A different morning,

A frosty lawn,

The same sun warming

A different garden and me,

Smoking the same pipe.

Different? Same?

Here goes the mind again!

That self same sun is far more different

From the one that shone upon

The other morning and garden,

Pipe and me,

Than any of those are from those of today.

Differentness, meaning, attachment, time,

Are but constructs of the mind,

That warp our perception of what is,

Like heat haze on summer days.

And as the sun creates shadows as it burns,

The mind does the same as it discerns;

This material world that we perceive

Is but a 3D shadow of reality.

A shadow which things appear distinct in;

A perversion of the real,

Born of our thinking.

Looking again at the garden,

Both carefully and without care,

The trees, grass, earth, worms and birds become one;

There is only consciousness, everywhere.