Well-bundled breaths

On my personal scale, I am infinite through and through
Though on a grand scale, I am infinitesimal
And this infinite mind is bound to fail
According to Nature’s infinitesimal ways

Compassionate beacons never fail
To remind my well-bundled breaths,
Are liberated, free
To walk within the abyss of space and time

Sky bodies display a grand, wordless wisdom
Despite all gains or losses of personal power
To observe and respect what never strays
From the steadfast path, through and through

On a grand scale, we are infinitesimal
Born from the timeless and never known
Filled with wishes, dreams and imagination
To discover a love for infinite beings, through and through

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Post Script

I wrote this poem in 2021 while thinking about scale. Within a single life, consciousness can seem infinite; against the depth of space and time, that same life appears infinitesimal. The poem moves between those perspectives without allowing either one to cancel the other.

The phrase “well-bundled breaths” carries me toward the approach of winter: cold air entering the lungs, clear skies opening overhead, and the world becoming suddenly unfamiliar beneath a heavy frost or the first snow. A familiar landscape can be transformed overnight, and with that transformation comes a change in perspective.

Winter also quiets the world. The cicadas are gone. The air is spare, and a solitary walk leaves more room for thoughts that warmer seasons may conceal beneath their abundance. Memories can remain bundled within us for years, then loosen unexpectedly in the cold—called forth by the smell of the air, the angle of the light, or the sound of one’s own footsteps.

The first frost marks a closing: summer and fall gathered together and carried across an apparent boundary. Such boundaries make us feel the passage of time, even while time itself may be another way the mind divides what is continuously arriving.

To be infinitesimal does not make a life insignificant. Each breath briefly gathers the world within us and then returns to it. In that exchange, the personal and the immeasurable are not separate. We are small enough to disappear beneath the winter sky, yet intimate with everything it contains.

Image credit: Cool trees under a hoarfrost (2012), Frank Kovalchek, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.