Wandering thoughts

Where is joy? Is change rejection? Is to return a process of stasis, or renewal? To push my work towards questioning instead of answering, I am instead filled with doubts rather than joy.

===

In my undergrad, which was itself a time of great change and uncertainty, a mentor of sorts for whom I still have great affection, and yet have lost touch with, read a favorite poems to my class. His voice was gentle, pensive, his manner a casual depth (that seemed to evoke wisdom) that I envied then and envy still. The words that he gave voice to were terrible, in the way that a vast space is terrible, or that true darkness is, in that there is some nameless potency to them against which human life is tiny yet also precious. I had never heard the words of this poet before. I have since read some of his other works, yet none reach me as did that poem—was it the words, truly? Or just the speaker?

===

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written,
I am not done with my changes

—Stanley Kunitz, "The Layers"