AUTUMN EQUINOX DISSONANCE (Revised for this year)

 

“Figure out the rhythm of life and live in harmony with it” –Tao Te Ching

 

How I’ve tried

To live up to

Lao Tze’s words

Most of my adult life

And I do

Until anger

Or fright

Interferes

Why can’t I

Accept things like

Political injustice

(The personal is always political)

Or hurricane season

(Live in Florida, stoically face the storms)

Or raging pandemics

(Distance yourself if others will not)

 

I want to be a human equinox

In perfect harmony

Acceptance equal to Happenstance

The point where the

Celestial equator intersects the ecliptic

A harmonious world

Orbiting the Sun

Even if not to my liking

 

My role model is a tree

Is it staring at me?

If so, it goes about its business

Of drinking and photosynthesizing

Of putting out leaves and acorn seeds

Never complaining

Accepting

And I think of Daphne

Evading Apollo

Turning into a laurel tree

Yet every part of the laurel

Is poisonous

Seems to me

She was better off

Fending off the god’s advances

Rather than morphing into

Pure misanthropy

Apollo, whom I think of quite often

He the god of music and poetry

Did give the world the word

Laureate

And the laurel wreath

In her honor

She now balanced

Idiosyncratically

 

So in the week before

The Autumn Equinox

I worked on Lao Tzu’s words

Read the Tao Te Ching

Tried to calm my Aries fire

Fear of the tropical flood

Beclouding my blood

As it rises like the wind

Winding cone-like

In air and spilling on the earth

There’s a long way to go, for me

Confession still not balanced in my seventies

I am a walking, writing vessel

For the elements of

Earth, Water, Air and Fire

But still expect the Equinox

To smooth life over

At least for a day

Until I learn to obey

The rhythm of life…

 

© 2020 Clarissa Simmens (ViataMaja)

IMAGE: Autumn Equinox over the swamp 2025