When I am held back, held from, held away, tracing shapes in the skies, making noise, burning fuel, knowing lies.  What is there except the unseen path? The turn and return, bearings sliding around the compass rose. What is this, but the denial of my approach? 

   No vectors, no path – just a point in space to circle and await instruction. The only place I know I can’t go lies ahead, and it’s hard to (k)no(w). Once I accept the limit as a verb, there is the doing, when what can be done is being done, and then, there is the no-ing, when what can’t be done isn’t, and that’s what I’m told to not do. My silence is considered my consent.

   Ever wonder if that business with the Tree of Knowledge wasn’t this choice of no-ing rather than doing – complete freedom, do anything for Love, eat, drink, keep, serve and multiply, but don’t do that. No? How so? Ah, now I no. 

   There’s the story of the Jews at the mountain in Exodus, when G-d says, Moses, I’m coming to you so the people will hear, but tell the people not to come here. The people tell Moses, we won’t come there, and neither will we hear.  Moses says, Do not fear, He is coming near. Moses, G-d says, give me your ear. What else could he do….sent going, into the dark thick cloud of Un-no-ing.

   At the foot of the mountain, the people wait. Moses descends, offers the covenant of life, seals them with blood of the lamb. The elders, the priests, their sons, rise up to feast with G-d himself, only to return, melt the gold for the ark into the image of their sin, offer blood of their own, regrettable and necessary, due to pre-existing commitments.

   Perhaps the first sin was the rising up. I didn’t see an invitation. There is a lot wisdom staying put, even when His table has empty seats. But perhaps it was even prior, perhaps it the was holding short, staying put. What else could they do? What awaited them there but dissolution? 

   Already, even here, my slow sublimation commences, time burns the world through with rot and decay – rending even the gossamer lattice of memories I thought safe in my Cloud.  

Yet I see the semi-lucid, vaporous truth,

 the things I thought were done are un – 

all I’ve seen just spots on the sun,

the light that is in me darkness, the traces run, 

my ruin my role – the only command from control? 

Stillness in the sky is to die. 

Low fuel – Please advise. 

Continue holding.  

Other fuels await.

  Perhaps stopping was their first sin. They could have circled – Joshua, Jericho’s circumscribe, could have told them that. Stopping is sinking. The orbit has a destination, the shadow of a helix, waiting weightless, “no-ing” to return is to burn. Settled and spun, stayed, shunned.