In the Dirt

In the Dirt

...is where you are rooted.

Don't be fooled
by the stars
twinkling in the sky.

Pay little attention
to the birds
soaring overhead.

Staring at the rising
and the setting sun
won't reveal the meaning
of your precious life.

For that
you don't look up,
you look down.

Let your eyes fall
past your knees,
beneath your toes
to the ground below.

Up is a distraction.
It's too big for you to know
and will leave you despairing
of its emptiness.

Down in the dirt
is where you are rooted,
in the thick mud and muck
of all being.

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There is,
one knows not what sweet mystery about this sea,
whose gently awful stirrings seem to speak
of some hidden soul beneath;
like those fabled undulations of the Ephesian sod
over the buried Evangelist St. John.
~ Herman Melville

We don't receive wisdom;
we must discover it for ourselves
after a journey that no one can take for us
or spare us.
~ Marcel Proust

I've always been interested in what else is here,
what lies beneath.
~ RuPaul

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