13 Comments
User's avatar
Navigate Yourself - Danijs's avatar

We are all the same, one or another way, sooner or later or simultaneously

Sara da Encarnação's avatar

There are shared patterns, yes... but saying we’re all the same flattens differences that actually matter. Experience and awareness aren’t interchangeable.

Navigate Yourself - Danijs's avatar

There is science. Faith. Philosophy. Depends what lens you are usong.

Sara da Encarnação's avatar

Different lenses explain different aspects, yes. But none of them erase the fact that lived experience and awareness aren’t the same across people.

Navigate Yourself - Danijs's avatar

Absolutely. If you and me lets say are subjects. Have you explored or heard of double slit experiment? There lay aspect of identity. Or origin of potential.

Sara da Encarnação's avatar

It’s an interesting experiment, but it speaks to physical systems under observation, not to the complexity of human experience. Different lenses can illuminate, but they don’t dissolve difference.

Douglas Wilton's avatar

We are not whole

We are not healed

But we are here

and here is vast

Here is vast

Here is ancient

This reminds me of something I sent to another Substacker yesterday

suggesting an alternative to his self-tormenting biography:

"Drop the pen

then silently, patiently

drown mad mind

in the mystery of Being that is always Here."

Sara da Encarnação's avatar

Not everything written from depth is personal history.

Sometimes it’s structure.

We would have very few songs if all lyrics were autobiographics.

Jay's avatar

There is, in the music you bring, not a declaration but a statement. We are here and all that we need to know to be who we really are is here too. We already have it, we don't need to travel to get it. It's here with us. Thank you Sara, as always, a bright light in my eyes.

Miles Hack's avatar

Love the opera choice of tonal direction for this piece…. How grand and beautiful Sara, great one… I had to take a few rocks on the porch chair after this

Adrião Pereira da Cunha's avatar

This poem feels like someone whispering the truth of their own survival, not to impress you, but to sit beside you.

It captures that strange, heavy place where life stops making sense and even breathing feels like work.

The questions sound like the ones we ask in our quietest moments, when nothing holds us up.

And then comes this gentle, ancient voice saying: I’ve been there too.

Remaining becomes something small and stubborn, the kind of strength that doesn’t look like strength at all.

It honors the people who kept going without answers, without light, without a clear reason.

It reminds us that staying alive is sometimes the bravest thing a person does.

There’s comfort in knowing others have carried this same weight and didn’t vanish.

The poem makes space for the broken parts of us without asking them to be fixed.

And in that shared endurance, it offers the most human reassurance: you’re still here and that matters.

Steve Elliott's avatar

Hooked by the two mesmerising questions that open this excellent poem.

Hannah Torkelson's avatar

This really put things into the proper perspective. Brilliant! Love the layout, too.