A Movement of Seaweed, A Dream of Awakening

I watched the moonlit seaweed moving back and forth.
My little boat was moving too.
The surge was too small to dislodge us
from the living bed that was our only anchor
but among the granite teeth of that unforgiving shore
it did keep us swaying hypnotically
like a morsel in the mouth of a giant
too absentminded to swallow.

I thought about the seaweed never being still
about a life at the mercy of the moonstruck sea
about a death where one could never rest in peace.
I watched the stars wheel in the restless sky
as I continued in my chosen place to contemplate,
oars shipped, sleep on hold, land at arms-length.
Is there anything substantial, anything that stays?
The rock at my shoulder said no. "Look at me,

you worry I will crush your fragile vessel
as you move and I do not, but in my essence
everything is all adrift. And the closer you look,
the smaller the particle, the more the dance
is being done by itself, the less by any dancer."
But motion, I replied, depends on something being stationary.
If nothing is stationary, how can anything move?
Without a dancer, how can there be any dance?

The rock had had its say, though, so I finally slept.
When I awoke, the sun was high and land was nowhere near.
The seaweed had released my little boat
and in that open ocean there was nothing to compare.
I rowed though there was nowhere left to go,
on salt air feasted and then drank till I was drunk 
the rhythms of the wayward waves.
My joy was not dependent nor my love 

and there the light was 
before any darkness and also beyond
and therefore everlasting.
 

4 October 2017
Texas Jim
Prospect, Nova Scotia