Ember

I have always been compelled to speak in generalities when invoking the subject of wholeness. For all that ails and goads the human psyche, who can deny, when all things are summed up, that things would be well if we achieved wholeness? We touch upon it in vague and cautious terms because we only know its antithesis; but all implicit decrees of nature point to it. It is health.

What the world is enduring now, in the latest epidemic of revolution and despair, reflects upon a chronic state of un-health. This cyclic state of affairs (punctuated by brief, infrequent periods of high culture and peace) is traceable to the very beginning: we belong to a fallen race of beings. Strange visions characterize our dreams. We remember a garden. Out of the silence of that infancy arose, suddenly and jarringly, the din and noise of ego. We carry a dull, threadbare memory of being shattered. Its sound still echoes mutely in our souls. We collectively retain a feeling of an aching, unquenchable desire for wholeness and we each, in our own way, struggle to satisfy it. Even now we remember what was lost, though imprecisely, symbolically, almost poetically.

Who are we?
A divine vestige?
A pocket of light, barely aglow, cleaved from its source, stretched in time,
adrift in a thermodynamic ocean:
an ember.
Some inherent warmth remains in it,
enough for an average lifetime.
But, beyond the veil of mortality,
the soul lives or it dies.
To live, it need place itself under God’s breath.
The eternal, resuscitating warmth
of divine breath quickens the soul
and the ember stands to become a fire.

Mihailo Vukelic is a multi-media artist and writer of short fiction and poetry. He lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.