Astonishment

In your endless quest for progress,

when you are ceaselessly tending your mind,

you cultivate the finer elements of intelligence,

insisting on the necessary climate;

insisting on learning to thrive in it.

It's intrinsic: this constant adjustment

and movement. Simplistic reductions won't do it.

Recalcitrant neurons must renounce skepticism

and fall into place like a game of Tetris; wisdom is

beckoning like a professor inviting you

to think, like the brink of a scientific discovery,

like a melody gleefully smashing your boundaries.

When all these analogies intrude on your privacy,

you, the cartographer, channel the pathways

of mental activity and, as though you were gardening,

you find time to plant and to water, to weed and to fertilize

the soil of your mind. So through all of it, I ask this:

That in your endless quest for progress,

you would cultivate astonishment.

The quick breath of it; the open eyes that enable it,

and with all of this, a propensity to discern the beauty

in every ordinary chord of reality's performance:

that indecipherable symphony in which we are

indispensable miracles, feeling ourselves in it; 

integrally at home in it.