At first only a few scribbles each carefully rendered, refined to convey essence - to distill that which needs transmission across generations, across the bridges that unite lovers, progeny, our separate halves In time the effort turned out volumes - a library of elaboration and exegesis trapped in the insufficiency of semantics needed to define what everyone already knows Neither was sufficient nor satisfying the more said the less it meant anything - language was too liquid to focus it too opaque to let truth be shared too common to teach anything But every mother knows in loving silence that the only lesson that matters is traced in the heart with one's fingers Before expiring he collected the cumulus of his life's work into a pyre As his legacy, in the ashes he traced with a finger the shape of the lotus heart - an image incomprehensible to the only birds that witnessed it and to the winds that snatched it in their arms 09-I-09