“Fickle”

I’ve heard the shaming speech

“She’s fickle”

Because I am ever learning

Reading books and reaching

Thinking, incessantly they teach me

I talk it out with others

Explorers discovering

Ideas, vast and illuminating

Amassed in dusty volumes innumerable

The spectres of a thousand dead thinkers

They linger; searchers speak

They are my kin

I listen, the voices in them swirling

I examine each to each, intuit

every chasmic breach

Still I’m open to believing

Receiving, their insight

Perception, just a glimmer

In the blackness of the sky

It remembers the light

A million light years away

Does that make me fickle?

Easily led astray?

No, I am not gullible

but logical, rational in the extreme

Reasoning through the proofs

Evidence supreme while Wonder plays her part

Mysterious and elusive

Deleterious to the unknown

As the wisdom of the ancients

Mingles in the understanding of the present

A common endeavor—truth

So I may reconsider

I guess I am fickle

Or should I shut my mind up tight?

Refuse to see the light?

Hang on to a fantasy

And close my eyes after glimpsing reality?

Unswerving and blind

Comfortably stable

No, I’ll be fickle

Reliably capricious

Always acknowledging

For some, life is a path toward enlightenment

A journey that has no clear destination

No deterministic end

A winding path, a road with a bend

Even a switchback or two

Just a rest stop here and there

A place to catch your breath

To be aware

That knowledge is an adventure

Spreading out before me

A road measured in years rather than miles

And wisdom is a temporary state of mind

I won’t be shamed for being fickle

My mind is mine to change

And the path I choose so fine