The Meaningful

By Andrew R. Duckworth

I.

What makes the meaningful life?
Is it persevering through strife?
Or is it perhaps giving an amount
Surpassing what you gain?
I’m no wiseman, no prophet,
No one of such honor,
No healer, no elegant speaker.
I’m just a man moving at my own pace.
And sometimes my mouth moves
With haste.
I have to rein it in sometimes.
I don’t know much, just a touch,
About what makes a meaningful life.

II.

Clarity, give me clarity,
With the clearness of water
Pouring down the melting glacier.
Clean eyes to cut through lies,
The ones that tie
The threads of the wicked weaver.
Give me the courage
Of Odysseus lost at sea,
Fighting, sailing his way back home.
The laws of justice,
That I might know them,
Chiseled in the hardest stone.

III.

Nature is my muse,
And all throughout nature
The line is drawn,
The words are spelled out,
Dripping wisdom onto a fool like me,
The waterfall of truth
Echoing engraved words into the soul.
Some dare to say that objective truth
Is nonexistent, a fabrication.
What they fail to realize is that
The mere utterance of such statement
Would imply some form of hard truth,
That pesky conundrum.
Oh, the irony.
Nature knows not but objective truth.
It is engrained with it,
Infused with it.
Apart from truth,
Nature is not nature,
Nature is but another fabrication,
Forever dependent upon
Our interpretation.

IV.

We interpret the text,
But words still exist,
Visuals still exist,
Whether we are there
To interpret or not.
Should we never read
The Old Man and the Sea
The truth of the text remains,
It is still there,
While our interpretation
Of the words is not.

V.

Objective truth brings meaning
As do our encounters with it.
But regardless of whether or not we
Encounter the wild,
The wild remains.
Regardless of whether or not we
See the elk at the water’s edge,
The elk still exists.
Regardless of whether or not we
Feel the cold of the mountaintop,
The snow still exists.
Regardless of whether or not we
Open our heart to the truth,
Nature’s Crafter still exists.