What in the Reincarnation is This? A Stuck Inside Poem, Day 31

You were a Monarch butterfly in a past life

but you moved around too much

and never learned to sit still

so in the life after that, you became a sloth. 

Perhaps you zigged a little too hard from the zag

because in your next life, you became an ant.

This time around, you were supposed to learn

how to be industrious and work in tandem with others.

You were supposed to learn how to be in synch.

How to anticipate what the group thinks

before they think it, but the queen isn’t looking for heroes.

So in the following life, you became a traffic light,

which seemed mundane at first. Blinking

in three different colors over and over again

and staying still until the storm hit. 

But then it occurred to you that you had become

a part of the setting.  You would finally learn

how to observe instead of project. You could

relax and take it all in.  You no longer

had to be a being.  You were now a thing.

Being a traffic light was like

being a fly on the wall of the anthill.

After the hurricane takes you away

and you land on your side a quarter mile away,

you might get to become a human

if you have been a good traffic light.

And you will come back as a human again

and again and again and again not unlike

when you die in Fortnite. It’s hard to stop

playing the game, but when you finally

get it right, when you figure out the

secret balance of compassion and forgiveness,

you will die in peace and move on.

Then you will come back as the ocean.

At first you will feel really big

until you realize you are only one very small part

of a much larger whole.  You are a set of lungs.

The tide is your breath.  Essential,

but alone you don’t tell the whole story,

only your part of it. 

You have been sick for the pleasured part of a century,

but you are getting better now ever since the ants slowed down.