Chasing the bibelots

January 2013

We scurry and we rush like creatures lost in memories in a labyrinth of time.  We are busy and are working and are trying and are planning. Even when we’re tired and exhausted, we are bravely coping and believing and still madly, madly chasing.

There are glimmers in the corners: tiny trinkets peeping through the hazy maze of pathways sometimes lit with choices. Yet a Sadness cloaks our waking and our sleeping with a weighty hopelessness and our rushing and our scurrying becomes a heavy, sad endeavour. 

We see the hidden bibelots, but are too tired: just too sad and tired and busy to stop and change direction.  They are hidden.  They are rare.  It takes effort to divert to chase a shiny thing and with the great deep Sadness comes great lethargy.

The heaviness of nameless grief grows like a weighted pack trekked through scrub for days; endless days.  We are exhausted from an instinctive resistance to the shadows that darken the pathways and so, slowly and steadily the great Sadness grows.

As holders of sorrow we become accustomed to the ache.  We take pride in the weight, dead as it is.

The tears dry up: withered salt basins replace tear ducts.  Headaches pulse across foreheads:  beat, thump and count the march of time in the labyrinthine mind.

Still there are glimmers in the corners: the promise of hope in the beauty of found things. There is rest in the stopping but Sadness has talons that grip, unrelenting.

I wish for this year an unsettling of weight in the soul madly chasing.  I hope that the yearning leads to confession of dead dreams and lost loves that let Sadness take hold.  I pray that we’d see the luminous blues of the face of compassion and reach for the glimmering, hidden and waiting.

Like a thread that unravels, I hope for discovery as we chase tumbling treasures and follow where they go.

Image taken by Katie Chown in Yangon, Myanmar, 2013, reprinted with permission