Ending Pleasure to End Pain

A ghosted brightness flirts through the pines. Moonlight brings it all closer. The last birdsong fades just ahead of distant fireworks. Under the longer legs of summer days, I write west-facing as to feel each ribbon of light as it slips into Lake Michigan. Even at 10 p.m., obscurity is warded off by slight hints of something lighter. Something undefined. Something more blue than black.

Like a new song, our dance is nameless until the end. Maybe the next thinker will have it all figured out – the purpose, the process, the performance. Krishnamurti says that if one can look at all things without allowing pleasure to creep in, without wanting the experience to be repeated, then there will be no pain, no fear and therefore tremendous joy. Ending pleasure to end pain. The whole meaning awaits to be known. I guess that is last lyric to be committed to memory.

The heat climbed into the upper 90's which slowed the work. Tomorrow's heat will lead us to the lake after a long winter of staying far from reminder of what water can do. The boat people will stop by throughout the day and ask for drinks and toilets and lake-like conversation. We will sit on the dock and stir the water with our feet and walk back and forth to the house in consummate hospitality. How the day will burn.

In the room of windows off the back of the house, turkish lights are strung in scalloped dips from corner to corner. Night frogs and crickets crescendo and fall as if they were purring, asking me to sleep. Maybe I no longer want what I don't have. Maybe I forget the rest. And maybe the hazy, sultry truth is a mirage rising in the heat of that which I knew would return.