in whose memory do you live?

***

the ties to the past are often also what hold us upright. without their anchors, we are like a shapeless, purposeless piece of canvas, vulnerable to the wind and the elements...

***

the boy must unlock his heart. it tethers him to the bottom of the sea. he must swim into the deep and the darkness, against the nature of the life and buoyancy that almost bursts within him, and find a place to insert the key that was given him...

the boy loses his heart in the darkness. he found it too heavy to carry with him, and so it sits, silent, at the bottom of the sea. he learns that there is a secret way to carry a piece of his heart with him, so that he may pretend to be like the others, so that he can pretend to be human. the secret was hinted at in a book by island heritage press that he once read, even before he knew how to read. it was a story about how an old wise man captured the moon by digging a hole in the sand. the hole collected a puddle of seawater, and that puddle held the full reflection of the moon within it... and there was a second story, that of kaguya hime, or rather a portion of that tale. the tale of the second hopeless prince and suitor to the moon princess, he who had to steal a beggar's bowl from beneath the half-closed eyes of a buddhist statue. he failed... the kappa reiterates that the bowl is key. he holds a bowl upon his pate, and it is formed of pennies rusted together... a concatenated string of words and phrases...

e pluribus unum. out of many, one. copper. hemocyanin. blue-blooded... in god we trust...

if you can carry the moon in a bowl, then perhaps you can also hold your heart within it...

the boy learns (from the kappa) the secret of carrying your heart. and he learns the pride and vulnerability of the kappa, that one who carries his dreams in a brimful bowl can never ever bow down...

the third and last lesson of the boy has to do with this very quandary... how it becomes necessary to be an empty bowl... to lose everything to become something.

this is the truth, the full circle truth, of the poem: "the heart is like a stone, tacit and silent. cast it away."

***

i feel such sadness at the passing of things. such infinite sadness. the world is fading before my eyes. i will keep this understanding, this brimful bowl of tears, and continually empty it through humility and bowing, even as it is refilled continually by the tragic rain.

***