The immeasurable joy that a pup feels upon spying the perfect stick—though is not every stick perfect?—to seize it between the teeth, to trot about in triumphant exaltation, to preen and prance, to clench and cherish it as though gold, or life itself, were held within the jaws, precious beyond all things. If only I could delight in anything with such unfeigned enthusiasm—as that stick, its discovery, its seizure, its hold.
Ah, to find such rapture in the ordinary! To greet the world not with suspicion but with wonder, to see in the roughness of bark and the scent of earth a treasure beyond price. She asks no meaning of the stick, no purpose beyond the play; she does not weigh its straightness nor lament its splinters. She exults simply because it is there—because it can be grasped, borne, and shared with the wind.
And when I feign to take her most prized possession from her, she does not crouch defensively nor guard it with wounded pride. She startles not in fear, nor suspects deceit, but spies instead an opportunity for play—for spirited contest, for joyous fun. A game of keep-away, of chase, of tug-of-war, of tag. The stick becomes not a treasure to hoard, but a bond to share, a spark of communion between kindred souls who, for a moment, forget the hierarchy of species and simply are. How effortless her wisdom seems: to turn every threat into invitation, every grasp into dance. What the world calls possession, she calls participation; what we call loss, she calls laughter.
Laugh I must too, for in her play I am carried back to youth—when a stick could be anything the heart desired: a sword flashing against unseen foes, a spear cast toward the sky, a knight’s lance, a shepherd’s staff, a trumpet summoning invisible armies, a conductor’s baton commanding the symphony. How endless were the shapes of imagination then! She reminds me of what I once possessed without knowing its worth—the gift of invention, the sacred power of play.
And so I laugh, though a tear is not far behind, for the years slip away like autumn leaves on the wind, and I remember what it was to live so lightly. She, in her wisdom, has become my teacher—her joy a gentle rebuke to my solemnity, her play a sermon on the holiness of delight. If ever there is grace to be found, it is in such simple acts: a stick, a chase, a glint of sunlight on the grass, a heart unburdened by purpose. Perhaps salvation lies not in grand design, but in this—to love a stick as though it were the world, and to find, in that loving, the world made whole again.
“When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” Psalm 8:3-4
The Psalmist, gazing beneath the vault of stars, marvels aloud: What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? The heavens dwarf him, the dust clings to him, yet he dares believe the Maker bends low, remembers, and grants worth.
But even in that astonishment, the shadow of doubt stirs. Another voice—the Philosopher’s—finds in the same expanse not remembrance but silence. The stars speak only of distance, the void carries no voice. Armenia and Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Rwanda, Ukraine and Gaza— the graves of countless innocents cry out: how can one still say, Thou art mindful? Likewise, science has stripped the heavens bare: no angels in the spheres, only galaxies colliding in indifferent law. Scripture, once oracle, is now artifact, sifted by history. Thus the question sharpens: not What is man, that Thou art mindful? but Is Thou mindful at all?
Between astonishment and silence stands the Poet, unable to forsake either. He reveres the psalm, yet trembles with the Philosopher’s doubt. Inheritance falters: the words remain precious, but their certainty slips from them. Still, he will not cast them aside. Instead, he holds the fragments as one might hold a candle in the wind: not enough to illumine the void, yet enough to keep the darkness from being complete. He labors to shape language into vigil, to bind meaning against the scatter of grief, to weave remembrance into flame so silence is not the final word.
Perhaps mindfulness is only man’s work— to remember, to wrest coherence from the scatter of loss. Or perhaps it is more: a presence that waits rather than speaks, a silence that shelters rather than denies. The Poet does not resolve the question; he learns instead to live within it, to practice reverence without assurance, until the asking itself becomes our mindfulness.
Some time ago—perhaps a year or more—I shared the thought with a friend that, in the absence of a life partner, career milestones, or the outward markers many associate with ongoing joy and fulfillment, I found myself sustained by something smaller, more elusive, yet no less profound: moments. Fleeting as they are, these glimpses—of joy, beauty, tenderness, or connection—carry a weight that lingers long after they pass. Whether in laughter with a friend, a burst of color in nature, the unexpected joy found in art and music, or the hush of shared silence, these moments are what remain.
This conversation was brought to mind earlier today, during a pause in some simple yard work. A robin—one I have come to recognize—perched beside me on a rock for nearly twenty minutes. He did not fly, only hopped, watching me as if we were resting together. That brief companionship, quiet and unexpected, brought back the full force of that earlier insight.
The poem that follows is a first, rough attempt to give shape to that reflection.
This robin, who kept me quiet company, reminded me of the beauty in small moments—and even allowed me, kindly, to take his portrait.
Moments
by Donald S. Yarab
After so long, I see it now— life is not the grand arc we thought we were writing, not triumph etched in time or years stacked with care. It is moments.
The held door, a beat longer than required. A cloud painting itself across the sky. A flower blooming through a crack in concrete.
The hum of a bee, the song of a bird, a friend’s first hello— welcome, familiar music in the air. Laughter spilling like light through a quiet room.
A touch that speaks without language. Sunlight flickering through leaves— nature’s own Morse code. The warm drift from the kitchen: garlic, hope, onions, memory.
The first bite of something sweet dissolving on the tongue. The joy of someone you love laughing till they snort, till they can’t breathe, till you’re laughing too at nothing, at everything.
These— small rebellions against the world’s weight: its monotony, its cold indifference.
But the moments— oh, they persist. They slip through the cracks of our hardest days and remind us why we stay, why we watch, why we dare to hope for just one more:
one more kindness, one more beauty, one more laugh, one more flicker of light— each a defiance, each a benediction in this brief, bright, impossible gift of being alive.
The Counterpoint of Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky
Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope Oil on canvas, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824).
On the Unmaking of Benediction
This cycle of verses—The Inversion Cycle—emerged not as a contradiction, but as a counterweight to The Blessing of Morpheus: The Sending Forth, a series of benedictions articulated in reverent tones and metaphysical gestures within the poem Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. That earlier work was rooted in the soul’s deep yearning toward the ineffable, culminating in luminous affirmations bestowed by the dream-god Morpheus upon the seeker. In time, those benedictions came to feel too complete, too resolved. I began to wonder: what if they failed?
TheInversion Cycle is not blasphemy, but a form of apophatic honesty. It does not seek to erase Ponder, but to stand beside it—its negative counterpoint. Each scroll of the cycle corresponds to a specific line or blessing from Ponder and performs an act of unmaking: where Morpheus blesses, these verses refrain; where he sends the seeker into mystery, these verses stall at the threshold; where he assures, they withhold.
To honor that reversal, a further restraint was imposed: the exclusion of the very vocabulary upon which the original work (and many of my other recent works) so often relied. Words such as breath, dust, light, shadow, silence, and memory—among others—have been set aside. Their absence is not a loss but a signal. These are not the tools we are permitted to carry here.
The scrolls appear here in the same order as the benedictions from Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. This reversal respects the original arc—from the loosening of dreams to the transformation of the soul—and follows its negative path with precision.
What remains is austerity, not despair. These unsacraments do not offer consolation, but they do speak. If Ponder was a song of ascent, then this is the long exhale after the music ends—a psalter of withheld grace, composed in the space where blessing does not descend.
Let this work be read not in defiance of belief, but in the trembling of its undoing. For if it is brave to bless, it is perhaps braver still to stand in the space where blessing will not come—and write there, in the dust, what remains.
Scroll I: Of the Clinging Husk
Let not your dreams fall— for they will not fall. They remain, clinging like husks unpicked, blackened not by season, but by refusal.
You will try to cast them down, but they are fastened, not to limb, but to marrow.
They do not curl like leaves. They do not return to soil. They sour upon you, a bitterness in the sinew, a ferment in the thought.
And if you turn to shake them loose, they will tighten. Their threads are not of sleep, but of habit, knotted in long forgetting.
There is no wind to lift them. No frost to loosen them. No gardener comes.
Remain, then, beneath their burden— bent, unshed, unchanged.
Scroll II: Of the Inscribed Weight
Take them. You will take them. You cannot help it.
The names carved into stone, the words burned into walls, the cries etched into earth— they cling not to your pack, but to your ribs.
You bear them not as titles, but as scars.
They whisper through your marrow, resisting every act of unmaking. You try to enter the place without form, but they speak before you. They call the ground by its old name, and the gate does not open.
Even the sky does not answer when it hears them rising again.
These names were not carved to remember. They were carved to bind.
And now, as you stand at the edge of the place where all naming ends, they press their syllables against your tongue, and you speak them, not in defiance, but because you cannot forget.
Scroll III: Of Implements Abandoned
Bring not the weighted balances, nor the woven snares of longing. They do not hold, not here.
Their handles crack in the frost where no stars rise to bless the hour. Their mesh is brittle—threaded not of wool, but of claims left too long in the mouth.
The mind, honed to edge, cuts only fog in this place. The heart, cupped too gently, spills what it never held.
There are no laurels in this soil, only reeds that do not bend and brambles that do not bleed.
And should you cast such tools before you, expecting fruit, or fire, or favor— they will return to you as ash, unsought, unshaped, the chaff of means mistaken for ends.
Scroll IV: Of the Withheld Offering
Bring not your hollowed chest, stripped clean of ornaments and plea. It will not be filled.
Wonder has no purchase here. Its gaze returns unreflected from stone too smooth to be shaped.
Let the mind remain loud and unyielding, for awe would shatter in this poise like frost-cracked bronze.
As for your feet— do not lift them. There is no basin here, only ground dry from the beginning, lined with rings that do not ripple.
The wind does not attend. It does not lift. It does not listen.
There is no path across this floor, only grit, and the marks of those who came thinking they would walk upon revelation.
Scroll V: Of the False Horizon
Do not seek. There is no one to be found.
The sea does not receive you. It is not fluid, but glare stretched to the edge of motion— shimmering not with promise, but with mirage.
You did not launch. You drifted. And your craft was not chosen, but assigned, drawn from timbers meant for no voyage.
The sky above you swells with stars, but none are true. Each one marks a path that bends inward, circling you back to your forgetting.
You will think you move. You will call it seeking. You will call it bold. But you are already known by the thing that does not answer. And it has left no threshold, only wind that cannot be charted and depth that does not hold.
Scroll VI: Of the Barren Threshold
There is no beyond. Only the gray field where sleep forgets its end and waking does not begin.
Here, nothing waits. Not voice, not veil, not even the last gasp of wonder.
What lies past dream is not fullness, but poise robbed of sanctity— the deafness of stones before their naming.
No stars ever hung above this place. No fire traced its vault. Only pallor, dull as bone in a dry shrine, untouched by flame or veil.
And death, so often imagined a gate, has no depth here. It is shallow, crusted, and holds nothing but its own refusal.
Let no one say this place is holy. It is not what remains made full— but vacancy made permanent.
A place unmourned. Uncalled. Unmade.
Scroll VII: Of the Unbecome
Go not. There is nowhere that calls. No road unfurls before you, no veil parts, no watchful eye lingers on your vanishing.
The question you bore was not accepted. It curled back into you, like a tongue that feared its own utterance.
You will not be shaped by asking, nor known by your seeking. You will remain as you were before the yearning— a vessel without fracture, never poured, never filled.
No sound will rise behind you. No trace will stir where your feet passed. Even the soil will forget your weight.
Be still, not in peace, but in the form that does not unfold. Remain—not as the question— but as that which never found its shape.
Scroll VIII: The Soul Beneath the Blanched Sky
The soul, girded and unmoved, stood beneath a sky without veil— a dome blanched of fire, where nothing had ever gleamed, only ash adrift from unremembered pyres.
It bore no garment. No mark of calling or descent. It was as parchment without script, unhandled, unblemished, unread.
No winds stirred the plain. Only cairns rose in rows, not raised in reverence, but born of the land’s refusal to yield.
The trees there had no buds. Their limbs were stiff, as if carved for stillness— a forest of halted prayers. And beneath them, the roots did not seek nourishment, but curled inward, content in their forgetting.
There was no calm, no sacred pause. Instead, a muttering of syllables rose from the dry hollows— sounds without grammar, without bond, giving rise to no names, no intelligible form.
And when the soul pressed its palm to the ground, there was no spring, no pulse, only crusted clay— neither moist nor cracked, a firmness that would not give.
It asked nothing. Not from pride, but from knowing that some places are beyond summons— places where even longing has been turned to stone.
Northcoast Antiquarian 