THE GLASS BOWL THAT CAME AND WENT

I was walking along keeping myself to myself. Concerned with a thousand concerns that perhaps I wouldn’t have been able to name if put on the spot.

The world seemed good enough to me and yet it was then that I noticed a tiny crack no thicker than a hair no larger than a finger-nail somewhere out there ahead of me as though I were looking into the concave of a transparent glass bowl.


As I watched the crack it seemed almost as though my watching it made it grow for all of a sudden it grew shoots in every direction and now all the things of the world seemed somehow perched between cracks; little islands of “now” ready to be punched out by the slightest breeze.

Piece after piece stared in at me and I begun to wander from what side of the glass-bowl the breezed would come.

I shielded my eyes as against a glaring light. I could no longer take in the scenery. I forgot what I was doing there in the street. Why I had come out and where it was I was going.


Then I looked up:

I saw a bird flying overhead swiftly without thought or concern. I realized it had flown straight though the glass bowl and that there were no fragments to be seen. All was simply one again. I carried on with the day so far.