Tropopause

Large pieces of snow have gradually covered the city white like a pointillist painting. I watched some of the flakes drift down while I walked and felt the dizziness of snow-globes. On the way to work, I saw the body of a bus broken down at the side of the road, the driver in his cube like an orb of silence - he seemed to smile as he read his paper in that hush of peace. No passengers, nowhere to go, nothing but the paper, and time.
Sometimes the picture of absences and emptiness can reveal, by comparison, how many thoughts a person is carrying around. I could hear the hum of concern over the final work I'm doing on a text that in some way justifies the past twelve years of my life. But there is no justification for such whistling wind in the mind.
Trouble begins when sets of days blend into each other like the big grey blah of the overcast. By contrast, is freedom: the green wave of streetlights; the unexpected παῦσις from passengers and the spluttering engines: quiet, choice words on the page.
Such orbs of of silence are like being high above in a commercial plane, at the level above the clouds, above the troposphere with all that snow, wind, and the electric storm from the friction of the mind. What is wanted is that upper limit where things change for the better, alleviating the pointillism of ellipses from Things Not Yet Finished. Just above the tropopause.
The simplicity of formlessness
Without form, so without aim,
Without desire, so tranquil,
All things go right as of their will. (37)
I came home and read some of the Tao Te Ching, benevolent also for all the space around the text. Things go right as of their will - that is my silent orb, the one I have been longing for. It suddenly seems to me that without realising it, one can hold Things Not Yet Finished in front of one's eyes to the point where the eyes go dizzy. The finishing does not lie in the work itself, but paradoxically comes from without.
When I stop caring to the point of exaggeration, work goes smoother, I soar above the weather, problems solve themselves. It is like that engineer whose solutions came to him in dreams, in the pause of the night. The answer is in the rhythm of movement, the IU of linguistics. The answer is in going just a little bit higher, above change, to the inspiring stability of abstraction. Bar-headed geese fly there, above Qomolangma.

Element. Photo in background.