…about what the sense of being lost in life –useless — feels like.
(And, by the way, it's not all bad.)
Here's what I mean, from "Li Po" by Martha Ronk:
There is the watery, uneasy feeling, that one has
been there before, has encountered that reservoir of emotion, some
other year, under one's fingertips if one could only remember when and
where; and how often of late I find myself seeking it in the utterly
useless as if I were, as I sometimes feel myself to be, the ancient
Chinese poet gazing at the moon's reflection and longing for comrades
of old from the other side of the mountains. Having been or having
thought myself to be committed to the useful, I now find myself
wandering into patches of sunlight for no reason but to be there,
looking down for long stretches at the arrangements of moss on stone,
floating on my back in a pond looking up at clouds. Uselessness is the
purview of the very young and very old whose gift is the finding out of
these reservoirs—even time falls off the edges, unrelated to anything
and especially not to you.
[h/p: Poetry Daily]
And here's a nice photo of that familiar, watery, lonely feeling, from my old friend Cary Odes, taken looking northeast
over the Clark Range from Lower Ottoway Lake, in the Yosemite
backountry:
Kit Stolz 