ex nihilo: Issue [5]
What Became by Jacquelyn Schneller
"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."
--Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
There is nothing more beautiful than spring in full bloom. Outside, the cycle of nature reminds us that even after the coldest, darkest winter, life renews. Lime Hawk's Issue 5 greets the spring with a reflection in three parts on life cycles and how we interpret our purpose and experiences within them.
At the beginning of this issue, we find ourselves in a plane, soaring over the ocean in Rebecca Macijeski's "Boston to Japan." In creation stories, the ocean is a formless void, the primordial pool from which all things emerge and find their shapes. So, here, we begin. In this poem, we reflect on the trajectory of objects as they fall, "Breaking Apart" -- much like the characters in ancient stories, the Adam and Eve of Genesis, representations of humanity in conflict.
Let's imagine we are the plane's passengers, floating onward in our great story to cities "...bereft and torn by wars...," to protests and confrontations with our finite nature, to reflections of what no longer exists, our "mutually observed extinction."
Still, we attach meaning. We continue to the second section, where characters attempt to reconcile with loss, separation, segregation, consideration, responsibility. We find lighter tones, realizing that out of nothing--ex nihilo--we care, love, joke, commune, make mistakes, remember, bless, wonder.
I still look out from
the forty odd years of my life
and wonder why I’m here.
And because I have no answer
I walk each night
to where the city has given out
and lost its breath.
---"Totem" by Sean Sutherland
In the end, we circle back to the ocean, traveling--this time by boat--and looking at our temporality in the face. We acknowledge our place in an endless cycle of creation, existence, and destruction, and we are OK. We are alive.
Things come, things go
as I have done and must again
a firefly, a spark across the sky
---"Last Night on Koh Tao" by Jota Boombaba
Read and enjoy Issue [5].