Whorls
Photo Courtesy of Jim Burklo
We are but eddies in the current of life.
I walked along a dirt path next to a roaring canal fed by the Deschutes River in Bend, Oregon: past budding chamisa, golden grasses nodding in the morning breeze, stubby juniper trees studded with pale blue-green aromatic berries.
Through narrows the water rushed, over steeps it fell in smooth sheets. Around bends it tumbled, creating backflows that spun into eddies.
Who's Jim Burklo?
Graphic visualizations of the human metabolic pathways include whorls of biochemical transformations that cycle back on themselves. As our hearts spin our blood through arteries and back through veins and then through arteries again, molecular processes swirl within our organs as well.
Memories arise and subside and swirl into sleep and then spin back into consciousness again in fresh contexts, taking on new meanings.
Thoughts swirl in circles, sometimes obsessing us with frustration, sometimes spinning us with delight, affording us the opportunity to mindfully contemplate the ways they spin.
I am a whirlpool in the stream of the universe. An eddy consisting of eddies that consist of eddies. Spinning now, spinning here, someday to be swept away into whirlpools downstream from my body and my ego.
We are all but eddies in the current of life…