Disastrous Ownership

I silently watch as the day unfolds around me. Of course, I am part of this unfolding, as well, though I must fix something to prevent my mind from becoming too clouded with the beauty of dynamics. I am aware of many low mutterings on all sides of me. The man and his child at the counter are trying to decide, as quietly as possible, which of the pastries they want to bring home to the matron of their house, who by this time has changed her desire from food to that of simple companionship in her long wait for their return. The separation that fosters worry and rumination produces relief when it collapses. I diffuse my thought and return to the revolving world. Another muttering exudes itself from the wires in the lighting above me, electrons creeping forward to complete the circuit, which by a separation of potentials allows for the light by which I am able to write these words. When that separation collapses, I will be left in darkness, only able to turn my notice to myself. And in that microcosm that I should of all things be master, I see the most embittering separation of them all – the kind that I can never have constructed. This is the separation of thought and self. For ‘my thoughts’ aren’t really my own. They are a water which flows through my consciousness, and which I must choose to observe, to embody, or to be affected by. All of my creativity, these lines, my fear, these pains… they are external forces which I hold close to myself but which, with some effort I may also divorce from myself. The artificiality of my experience now blackens me. I am forlorn. It is a childish notion, really. How can I expect that anything is really my own? I am given this time to have life, to have thought, to have anything, only by basis of loan. The desire to accumulate is a futile one. Shall I wait for my fall, when all things proceed away from me at once, or shall I let them trickle by as is natural so that I am not collector but conduit? I am jarred from my reverie. The man and his child have decided upon macaroons. The light above has burnt itself out. I have slipped back into a realm of disastrous ownership.