I’ve heard it. Read it. Maybe you have, too?
To simply exist is not truly
Living life. So what is it,
If you’re living each moment of your life
Alive, isn’t enough, seemingly,
To qualify. To escape falling
Into the group of those who lead unlived
Lives. What does that mean? Great adventure
Passed? Excitement missed? High times skipped?
Is it surfing a perpetual wave
Of adrenaline rush in order
To what?
I believe there were
Those moments in my life where some blissful
Event flew by faster than I could
Have a chance to experience
Joy. It happens. No joy. No fulfilment.
No doubt – you too – we’ve suffered through some
Mournful moments, times of sorrow.
And all of us would say, definitely,
We were living them, wholly alive,
More vital than ecstatic ones.
I meditate daily, the thought being
That I live in the moment, as in
When you travel, you must put down
Your phone sometimes to time in order to take in
What’s there, experience it firsthand
Not filtered second through a lens,
Those hundred photos you may never see
Again, remembrances of things shot,
Pale prompts of pale impressions cost.
My meditation goal’s to clear my mind,
Empty it of all thought, returning
To the blank slate it was before
Before I’d anything to remember.
Ironic? To live in the moment
Trying hard to experience
Nothing. What joyful rush do I feel there?
I’d need some meditation on that –
When not meditating, of course.
Ke‘oke‘o came, eventually,
Every night to sleep on my lānai,
Not even six months old when she
First found me, and I began to feed her,
Hoped to tame her enough to trust me.
Feeding her to create some sense
Of home, a place where she could live her life,
If not with great joy, at least without
Fear, a moment of peace, of rest.
She was right to be afraid of almost
Everything, my beautiful, blue-eyed,
Snow white kitty, moonlight shimmer.
Friday, a speeding driver on my hill –
They truly live their lives behind the wheel
As if all roads were a race track –
Killed her outside my house, crushing her skull.
She was still warm when I picked her up.
She’s buried in my yard now, not
Living her life.
We still speak when I pass
Her grave, I living those sad moments,
She now resting peacefully.
I wonder if in her short, hard life, she
Ever even experienced one
Moment of any kind of joy?
Lanning Lee 