Beneath Community

The Rule of the "Gilded Shadow"

The superstition goes that if a streetlight flickers or hums just as you pass directly beneath it, you shouldn't look at your shadow until you reach the next pool of light. The Glitch: A flickering light is seen as a "thin spot" in reality. If you look at your shadow while the light is unstable,... read more

A Simple Mirror

For the longest time, I wandered— restless and unsure— searching for a mirror that could hold my reflection without altering it. I did not realize how long I had been standing before the wrong ones. Some were grand and towering, and somehow, beneath their magnificence, I felt smaller… as if I... read more

Road

The road goes on ahead of me and then—without ceremony—withdraws. It does not end; it simply dissolves into a pale conspiracy of fog and grey sky, as though the world were shy of its own continuance. I walk toward that vanishing point with the quiet obedience of a man who has accepted that... read more

Shasta

You fill the air the way dusk fills a valley—without announcement, without demand—until even the stones begin to breathe differently. I do not speak your name. It trembles too near the surface of things. Instead I measure you in distances: in the hush between two heartbeats, in the way the horizon... read more

Emptiness.

All things arise not from some eternal core, but from a delicate web of causes and conditions—ever-shifting, impermanent, interdependent. A flower opens because of sun, soil, rain, seed, and the countless unseen threads stretching back through time. Remove any strand, and the flower never was. Thus... read more

What Remains After the Silence

I am the rest of something gone, a fading spark beneath the rain The dawn arrives, but not the dawn that once knew how to numb the pain I move through thoughts that twist, like a maze I built without a map I lose myself at every end, then wake again inside the trap I search for truths I cannot... (edited) read more