A Poet's Journal: February 26th, 2015

 

February 26th, 2015

How rare to have body and mind on the same page!  It is not easy to do the things we want when we want to; the auspicious moment always seems to grow from inability and our inability from a desire for something more.  Imagination drags us through this lonely field, giving us our tasks, our worries, making the distance around us insufferable.  And so whenever I have something to do, it is very difficult not to get caught up in the imagination of doing it before it is actually done, working through it a hundred times.  I am not speaking of preparation or details here, but the simple idea of a future to come, and what that future might bring, and how we might handle that--this is the imagination, this is the gateless gate, firmly shut and too defiantly high to look over; this is the gate that never was nor ever has been a gate.  Yet it is richly adorned and so much a part of our inability that it seems better to look at and keep closed rather than pass right through untouched.

Douglas Thornton