You Are Born

I'm eager to meet you. I hear you're about to materialize.
You don't have a name yet, but that will come in time.
See all these colors. They have names. I will teach them to you.
You are born knowing how to walk.
You are born knowing how to ride a bike.
You will come alive to the names of earth, fire, air,
and water because these are the four classical elements.

You will fill a pair of shoes, and they will take you places.
Look at the sign over there. It says you are about to fall
into a body that was once stardust. In a far land,
you will feel heat and cold for the first time.
You are not that far from the center of the earth.
The sunbeams giving you Vitamin D traveled two minutes
from your closest star. Tonight the stars will rise.
Look at the Big Dipper. That is how it looked more than
two minutes ago.

Every hair on your head is numbered. If you had a twin somewhere
in the world, he might be writing the very same poem.
Did you know that the concept of zero had to be invented?
Did you know that people only started walking for pleasure
in the past two centuries? It's called rambling.
William Wordsworth was the first. The garden of the world
was his office. He was the last poet to speak the language
of the common man.

Language and matter are born teachers. You may want to be
as tall as a tree. You may want to be as unyielding as stone
if that is where your heart leads you. Even grunting and groaning
have a tradition. The singing Neanderthals talked this way.
They put their vocabulary to song to make things more pleasant.
Everything is beautiful. No worries.
     You can feel the presence of a flower or a mountain.
Matter can neither be created or destroyed.

Your thoughts are actually energy from the sun.
Your ideas are making things that can change the appearance
of the world. Doesn't it feel motionless when you're riding
on a train traveling parallel to the freeway.
The best place to walk barefoot is on the beach.
Things wash up on the beach from all over the world.
A sand castle will last if you carry wet sand to build on dry sand.
     Reality is like a film.

There are no continuous actions, only frames.
The few who have traveled the roads of the mind report there
is a point and then another point, but nothing is connected.
These masters leave no footprints behind them,
but what about a novelist like Jim Harrison who creates characters
and listens to their stories. What if you didn't have a body,
but were only a character in fiction? Could you move things?
Could you smell a home cooked meal?
Would you have to eat and drink water to stay alive?