How often I slip
on the slick leaves The Unequal
pulls me up again
Notes
The haiku is a “fall” haiku — the season is the scene of such happenings. Which happenings?
The energy is leaving the world — leaving the leaves, which are rotting underfoot. Yet that energy — or is it a more original energy — which comes from outside the self in an emergency, and “equalizes” the fate of finite things — it is unnameable, but in the event, a surge of praise rises as response.
The “I” of the finite self is subject to the whim of contingencies, but in certain circumstances it becomes “me” in a “hyper” happening, or event from beyond the self. We know this from experience but we have no language for it.
Well, we DO have a language for it. This is from God and the Between, by William Desmond:
“What is it to ‘make way’? it is a surprising creativity that is not actively subordinating of anything. The Unequal does not flatten itself but reverses itself, placing itself on the footing of the creature, equalizes itself for the sake of the other. This is the divine patience or (com)passion entry into all that the finite undergoes, including poverty, abjection, despair, and death. For love of finite life, the agapeic God harrows even hell. This is the opposite of the self-enclosed transcendence that the dualistic way proposes. The porous between is nothing static, but an ongoing milieu of divine absolving: absoluteness in relativity, relativity in absoluteness.” (255)
