Considerata IX: A poem and reflection on 2019

CONSIDERATA IX

Go! To spaces, virtual or real, that not only shape your imagination 
but also transform it
Spaces are not inert
They trigger the yays, nays and mays of our anima
Crafting our behaviors like shadow batons 
Sculpting the music we make in the world. 

Whatever space you inhabit at anytime
Even as you walk, run, climb or swim.
Act to restore it.
Sapien – “wise” – that we claim we are
We cannot expose and talk about the crises
And withhold genuine acts 
To restore spaces for life to breathe through. 

Let us be each other’s safe harbor 
from natural and self-crafted storms 
They are all real.
Rest and master the art of adjusting our sails for the new.  

But be wary of souls who close chapters in shared lifetimes
With borrowed virtual words to say “goodbye” 
10,000 human generations 
are densely strewn with welcomes and farewells
HOW we say goodbye and hello
Are measures of the wealth of our souls.

 Online fiddling with the trifles of your life and of others
Makes for trends on Tweets
But it NEVER makes you BETTER
Most algorithms serve and reinforce our worst impulses
Artificial intelligence thrives on our natural stupidities. 

We still have to flex our own mental and emotional muscles
To escape the orbit of our own superficial and mean tendencies 
And land to build a kinder human nature
Our wondrous world deserves. 

Always a potion or a key
Claiming to unlock human life’s infinity
Maybe we should swing with as much vigor
To concoct an alchemy
To redeem lives cut short 
by wounds we could have healed
Had we changed our minds 
Or heard their stories. 

But we will still all die.
Even if we can now skip rope over a century
Each of us will still pulse our last. 
And click the final button.

What will the image of life be after you have gone?
Beyond that final dusty solitaire.
Your life mattered to you 
But did you connect the dots to know it was not just about you?

We push and quest for sensory outliers
To feel more and more alive 
But nothing charges and resurrects like a sense of gratitude
A field of blown dandelion thank you’s  
to those souls blanket veiled 
by work and circumstance too plain and ordinary
To hold up your constant stream of extraordinary. 

Recognize lies, especially when it is your own.
They erase you from within. 
Amassing a hole 
So deep that you cannot escape it
Not even death can erase it.

But as much as you can, enter many hours of your life 
with a mindful cookery so slow
Brewing sticky moments like heated marshmallows
To feel the splashes of spritzy joy in agenda-less times
The split-second shared chuckles with strangers or 
The cloud-breaking sunny smiles in bleak times
When the here-and-now becomes eternal.

The succulent micro-rivers in watermelon slices
The levity of a lemon cake sponge 
or the rubbled nutty sweetness of a pecan pie slice
all find their once-upon-a-time, in the story of our one Sun.
Majesty inhabits all – cloud runners, glistening rain, the mighty Mount Apo, 
elusive blackholes, eye locks, handshakes, and scalloped cheese bakes.

Be yourself. 
It is the only signature required for your own life.
Love, learn and thank with a madness 
that could rival a planet-sized durian’s outrageous sigh!

If you’re going to stop time
Know that it can stop you.
It has zealous agents all named “anytime”.
But what time cannot do
Is fill your life for you. 

Live and love beyond the tribe you were born into
Genes are the stories of birth
But your humanity is a full life story.

 We are humans but we are also mammals and animals
Connected to a life support cradled by a planet
Your DNA is glaring proof
We came from the earth 
And not unto it.

Show up.
Our souls still feed
On eyes that lock
Hands that clasp
Simmered to tenderness 
In the aromas of the now.

 We are all spread out in time.
You have a time travel machine in your head
That can understand beyond your own time.
Tricky as it is, know when to listen 
and when to forego.

 Nothing rivals “Why” to clarify purpose
Technology seduces with what’s and how’s
But they all only take the crown when they can bow to “Why?”

 Despite your sense of self everywhere at once in digital stamps
you still live in a real, genuine universe!
Coming from 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang
You did not have to log in to be born
Live knowing all that light 
Came to birth you. 
You are here.
NOW.

Whether or not you care about the sciences, the arts
Animals, plants, forests or seas
Your erring friend, your complicated other
Your perplexing family
this is the only universe that holds them all.
It birthed all your atoms 
and what you have made of your own atoms.
In your end time, it will see your atoms, your dusty atoms.
And your atoms will recycle.

 Atoms to atoms.

 But not your story.
Your story had but one chance.
Sizzle with the craft of your being.
Whatever form it takes.
City farms, artbursts on sidewalks, dancing on rooftops
Speakeasy classrooms
Passion will power carve 
from the direst of straits
Life streets of your own desire.

But as you insist on your humanity, let it grow.
Recognize when you have to change your mind
In times when it is hardest to do so
Forgive, admit to our failures, surrender to a better idea, and let others have their turn. 

And as we are suffused with the unmatched luminescence of day
Or are sheltered above by the celestial brushstrokes of night
 Click your heels for that is
irrevocable proof of a universe alive with light.
And when you gaze, you capture that light
That same light
Awash on the face of your beloved
Infused as lightning inside the bodies of children at play
On young questers energized to scale heights and plomb depths new to them 
And unbearable irrefutable beauty playing out 
in coasts, sandy dunes, and forest canopies
Infused with life-moving critters 
rooted in and rooting for 
land, sky and sea. 

Cup your hands to catch the passing year’s light 
as it signs off this zone in spacetime.
All that was, is now crowdstored in all our minds.
We will remember but only through our filters built-in
Truths are partly what happened and partly how we remember them.
How we WANT to remember them.

 The universe was here before anyone had a first memory.
It will be here after you yourself turn off the light on your last.

But only you
Can make a story out of the light that brought you here.
Only you can weave the piece from your own fabric of spacetime. 

Dawn is here.
Awaken resplendent with love and light.
Happy New Year.

– Rappler.com

Maria Isabel Garcia is a science writer. She has written two books, “Science Solitaire” and “Twenty One Grams of Spirit and Seven Ounces of Desire.” You can reach her at sciencesolitaire@gmail.com.