Within a mirage,
the interactions of two
seem to produce another.
Relations, observations—
yet no proof
of the intrinsic, the vital.
From the view of time:
no hindering,
no wasting.
Post Script
The mirage in this poem is not the dreamlike world itself. It is the illusion that we stand apart from it: that we are separate from the myriad things, possessing an independent existence with firm boundaries of our own.
Conventionally, we see two things interacting and producing another. Yet the closer we look, the harder it becomes to locate where one thing ends and another begins. Each depends upon conditions, relationships, observation and time. The apparent edges soften under attention.
This is emptiness, but not a destructive or nihilistic emptiness. It does not mean that nothing exists or that life has no meaning. Emptiness is generative: because nothing is fixed or self-existing, everything can arise, relate, transform and become meaningful within the whole.
We live, as I understood it then and still understand it now, within a dream inside a dream. The delusion is not that the dream appears. The delusion is believing that anything within it—including ourselves—exists alone.
From the view of time, there is therefore no hindering and no wasting. Nothing waits outside the unfolding. The myriad things are continually creating and being created by one another.
Image credit: The Geologic Time Spiral—A Path to the Past (2008), Joseph Graham, William Newman and John Stacy, U.S. Geological Survey.
Primitive Joe 
