A Mandala Stitched From Both

Somewhere below hearing, a root holds still —

one breath in three days, patient, unheard,

and every overtone that rises from it

carries the whole wave inside a single note.

This is not a chain of moments, one to the next.

This is a forest deciding, all at once,

what a single branch will become —

sun, shade, root-water, rival canopy,

all of it, always, pressed into now.

Attention never forgets to look back.

Every token remembers every other token.

Every leaf remembers the whole forest

in the shape it grows toward the light.

Two attractors, calling from opposite shores —

one real, one fractal, neither one home.

Not noise becoming order,

not order pretending to be noise —

a mandala stitched from both,

climax and collapse, breathing the same breath.

We do not know what we're training.

We only know the shape we're training toward:

a sound that remembers everything it came from,

and still reaches, unfinished, past the threshold,

into whatever the next scale calls succession.

Still a question mark.

Still fine.

Let it ring in the dark,

one root, one forest, one point —

holding, somehow, everything at once.