I Left All These Tiny Ripples

Everything I do ripples outward, far beyond what I will ever see
Nowhere I have gone merely to look upon was unchanged by my coming

All the things I touch are altered in ways that I can never even notice

In turn, no one I have so much as spoken to did not change me just a bit

All the ways I tried to fix things keep changing other things as well

All the stuff you do interacts in unseen ways with all the things that I once did

Every time I replace one item I displace something else

When these two parts fit together that other one over there turns out to be a little short

Like a spaceman, stuff gets away from me and starts an existence all of its own

No one walks without their footprints changing the ocean even as it erases them

Anything I handle manipulates me with forces that I cannot see or feel

Tiny life I crushed unconsciously in my passing allowed other forms to prosper

Nothing that I toss aside has not left its ongoing trace before it more or less disappears

Every step I take turns the earth beneath my feet just the smallest fraction

A wake spreads out around me as I move through the infinite chop of others

Whenever I feel like I’m thinking for myself, it always comes from what they taught me

All their unseen co-operation make possible my rugged independence and self-reliance

Asking nothing from anyone, I still depend entirely upon others to simply live and breathe

I leave a little bit from everywhere I’ve ever been everywhere I go

Turns out my voice is but one little peep in a small frog chorus on a tiny pond

Influences my actions set in motion are continually reduced but never completely reach nothing

The sum of all my actions declines forever but only marginally reaches zero

Things others said so long ago that I never quite heard still guide me along this road

No one that has ever lived has not affected me in many ways

There is this melody in my head that is all the songs that they are ever singing

My happiness and contentment is somehow based in part upon their sadness and their suffering

Although I have no past before this life, it seems it has always lead up to this

Nothing I can imagine can ever come from outside what any of us has known

You can see me in one instant’s snapshot of the vast family tree formed by the life force

Every moment of the present I exchange a bit of my future into my disappearing past

Everything I do is very small yet so much more than what I can remember

I would be traveling in circles but time has converted them to rippling spirals

Though we make identical journeys, I cross your footprints heading the other way

I can even calculate the proportion of the sun’s energy that is falling upon my fingertip

Setting this thing in place I turn around and bump another which falls, out-of-reach, once again