And What of All This Swirling?

And what of all this swirling?
To see life always in reflection
On the eye to which I hold myself

And when until its stopping?
Can I hold for longer still
With all I know awash?

And essence—what to know
And what to let slip through—
When will it matter?

Time—to hold and time for
All. But what—and more,
For whom? It never started.

And if I should exist
Only for my own sake—
Then what?

This is another of the oldest poems in my collection. It speaks of a tumultuous period in my thinking.

I was suffering at this time from undiagnosed depression and anxiety; I was riven with heartbreak and a quiet self-loathing. I was also grappling with the apparent fact that my mind is a use-it-or-lose-it system—I found that I could not hold onto knowledge and memories indefinitely. This felt like a slow and constant dying.

In my head, I felt an incessant swirling, an inability to rest in any truth or to summon simple awareness.

If you’re feeling this way today, please know that today I appreciate you beyond words. Myself and countless others, known and unknown, are thinking about you, though we may not yet know your name.

Though the title of this blog has overtly religious overtones, I am not here to preach a particular system of thought as dogma or the capital-T “Truth” of the world. Rather, my aim is to start a conversation.

In fact, my book The Trinitarian Mystery is intended to seed an ongoing conversation on the ways we hold the world and move within it. That is why I have written a prompt for Claude 3 for readers to converse with as they read. I have also created a GPT pre-loaded with all my writing for the same purpose.

I really want to engage with you and learn about your ideas.

You are indispensable. Your ways of seeing the world and moving within it are invaluable, hard-won wisdoms that are worthy of sharing.

To answer my younger poetic voice, I do not exist only for my own sake. And if it must be swirling, then let us swirl together.

Yours in love and gratitude,

Mark