1. For a split second I glimpse the perception of a consciousness hovering above the city. On its way to elsewhere, it pauses, observing, struck by the will-less motion of the teeming, hurrying consciousnesses below. Stop and go, turn and tarry.

2. Something aligns, and for just a moment I share its watching, its regretful surprise at the ill-focused anthill busyness, and its further surprise at its own reaction. It had thought itself beyond such judging.

3. In the last nanosecond before the alignment fades, a question mark flies from my mind to its: "What then is the proper use of consciousness? If not all this, then what?"

4. If not to lessen the black scratches of pain, the eternities of hunger, the echoing vacuum of loss, then what?

5. Yes, they—we—hurry and scurry, covet and acquire, use and discard, but also along our busy way we scatter good, like naïve bees unaware that as they gather stuff they need they also aid the propagation of wholly other, unknown species.

6. What was the source of that fleeting regret? Or was it something more than, or other than, regret? A transient, this passing consciousness drops pollen which means one thing to it, another to me, and something else altogether to this world on which it alights?

7. Tat tvam asi. That—and that and that and that—is also you, as you also are it.

8. Become that perception and all may not be well but it becomes at least self-tending.

9. Judgment is in the why of the beholder, regret in the lie of the beholden.

END