May 07, 2005

The Well and the Tower

The Well and the Tower

The staircase winds around and around;
No one knows it's beginning,
And no one knows where it will end;
Except for perhaps the stairwell.
Does it know and not say?

The foolish tread too far to the left
or too far to the right.
Wise or foolish,
One soon wends out of sight.

The wise follow the winding path,
And pause only briefly
Knowing it is an Escher staircase that follows its own ineffable rules,
And it is a staircase where one cannot stay still very long;
Not even the dead.

No matter where one starts;
Soon one is walking on the other side
where one just tread;
Or is encountering someone,
who just a moment before fled.

None can foretell when the staircase will end.
One moment one is climbing,
The next moment one is descending,
The Next one is falling.
…And Perhaps the next moment?
Well, it is presumptuous to claim to know.

I worship the staircase.
I know not whether it is a tower or a well,
I accept my confused babbling,
And pray my path doesn't lead to hell.
I worship the water that comes from the well.
I worship the winding path that I now walk.

Chris
Posted by cholte at May 7, 2005 06:25 PM
Comments

I take the staircase as a metaphor of life. I know my life seems like that going 'round and 'round and winding up in the same place not knowing which way is up sometimes. I guess each round of the same problem is helping me refine a better responce. I also agree ( if I understand what you're saying) that we have to accept and embrace our lives as they are in order to both value them and improve.

Posted by: Philip Brett at May 9, 2005 06:01 PM

Great imagery, Chris. We don't know where the path will take us, or even where we really are in the present moment. But it's the PATH itself that matters. I enjoyed the way you expressed your journey... (Have been trying to post a comment for days but keep getting a message that you have set up a system to prevent malicious spammers and I need to try again later.)

Posted by: queen lolo at May 15, 2005 03:14 PM

To Queen Lolo; don't take the messages personally. This blog was spammed several times, and to prevent spamming there were changes to make it difficult to write more than a certain number of comments in a certain period of time.

I've run afoul of this myself when Mike Ryuie was writing something interesting at the same time that someone else was. Additionally we have to close old blog entries to new comments after a time for the same reason. It's really a pain but once you've been burned with come-on invites to some strange person's bedroom you see the point of it.

Personally I see the poem as reflecting a confusion over whether I'm climbing the tower of Babel or descending into a well; whether this is purgatory, a stairway to heaven or to hell...

Chris :-)

Posted by: Chris at May 19, 2005 09:51 PM