A thousand kilometers stretch

between my book collections,

and life is halved and doubled;

each homecoming a resumed reading;

every departure an aborted one

but departures as well as returns

include both implications

of the peculiarities of travel;

of the nature of movement;

the going and the coming

in the Yin & Yang of relocation,

when all homecomings carry,

in themselves, departures and fare thee wells;

every leaving housing an appearance, a reunion

The two characteristics of the journey

are life and death,

confusingly and blindingly similar;

birth and demise in one gaze;

thus a dichotomy of the elastic present

and an entanglement across the distances;

shortening and lengthening of thoughts and emotions;

acceleration and deceleration

in a playfully serious tug-of-war;

the undulating steel song of the rail

through the depths of great forests;

an intertwining of lives

But since my northern habitat is inhabited

by Anna and the animals,

and therefore always in flux,

whereas my southern abode is a man cave

and a retreat,

where everything is as it was

when I return,

their Yin & Yang are wrung out of equilibrium,

oscillating like two celestial objects

of different mass and density,

caught in a cosmic dance;

a vast ellipse of living;

a powerful imbalance

of closeness and desolation;

of silence and voices,

of that which was and that which becomes,

of missing and the joy of reuniting;

of love and the longing for love;

of hunger for solitude

and the leap out of loneliness;

The movement in itself pregnant with revelations

on the threshold of the unforeseen

that sprouts in every crack of existence,

out of the potentiality of a myriad worlds

wrapped in an immeasurably thin veil

of time and space

in the tremendous creative power

of every wasted second