If the Mind Is Not the Brain
by Lana Hechtman Ayers

Perhaps the mind is the shadows of the crows passing over
dried blades of summer grass, or hummingbirds flitting
too swiftly for the naked eye, or else the tenuous grasp of
a plover on a tiny sand crab wrestled from wrack of bull kelp,

or the whelp of a baby sea lion on the shore across from
the river bank, a basso voice met in the air by its own echo,
or the slow rhythm of the river flowing toward the sea
as if eternity was but a moment, a moment all eternity.

Or possibly the mind is the way the fir and cedar and hemlock
stand their ground, roots firmly planted, though branches
are as various as thoughts that waver and shiver, restless,
a landscape where stillness is the exception, a dancing forest.

Don’t forget the rolling hills and the distant mountains,
the rough terrain and soft mossy paths, the way sunlight
and clouds hover over them, making new paintings every hour,
hill peaks and edges wind- and rain-smoothed over time.

Maybe the mind is sand, countless grains of worn down bits,
inheritance of gone by lives of millennia, that gather like
a community of snowflakes into something with surface
and heft that can shift and hold the weight of substance.

Perchance the mind is simply, as Dickinson tells us,
the sky, wider than the sky, without limits, an atmosphere
all its own, that protects and makes precious all of life,
down here on a tiny planet in the middle of nowhere.

Though the mind is certainly not a raindrop, not singular,
It’s a downpour, communal, as uncountably multitudinous as
the stars, but closer, kind as the humble bee buzzing blooms,
making sweetness and plenty possible in our brief existence.


after Patricia Fargnoli’s “On the Question of the Soul“