Number Fifty Eight

Let go of time.  It cannot help you: looking forward, looking back -- as if it was real.  The future causes the past as much as the past causes the future.  What you are about to do affects what you have already done.  Your death in each life leads to the day in that life when you were born.

The future is the story you have not yet told yourself, but still know.  The past is the story of what might happen if you choose to reenter this life.  Let go of time.  It carries you only if you believe in it.  The future and the past are here -- now.  They have always been. And they keep changing.

Number Fifty Seven

Wind moves the branches.  We have watched this near the Nile, in the forests of the steppe, in the high divides where trees bow down in the raging air.  The wind comforts us because it has always been there, in every life, pushing across prairie and sea.  It makes the white out where someone, walking between familiar landmarks, is lost; and small waves that rock the boat we doze in.

Wind has been with us, an icon of how the world moves: taking and giving.  Taking a life and promising breath.  Always.  As if we had come here to inspect time: to see wind wearing away mountains, and that still place between susurrant movements of air.

Number Fifty Six

The current of time appears constant.  We seem further from the source and more alone as one-by-one our loved ones leave the river. 

But time flows only within the banks.  The villages we live in between lives are above the river, outside of time.  We enter time -- to forget.  To believe the river is all there is, cold and deep and roiling.  We can enter the river anywhere -- from the headwaters to the mouth.  Time receives us, takes us, teaches us -- till we drown.  Over and over.

Time was invented by consciousness.  To measure change.  We enter time to change.  To grow wiser and stronger in the water.  Whatever we become is taken back to the village, to the place we are becoming god.

Number Fifty Five

Peace is not a legitimate goal of life.  Avoiding pain by avoiding attachment is not a workable life goal.  While attachment is the source of pain, it is also the source of love and beauty.  Beauty and love are attachments.  Rather than detaching, our goal is to struggle to learn, feel, and love in the face of pain.

Number Fifty Four

At the funeral, all eyes are on the coffin.  As if the one inside was the victim of misfortune.  As if he or she had been struck down by some random fate.  Something indifferent; violent.

Death isn't bad luck.  Because there is no difference between the living and the dead.  The one in the coffin is doing the same thing as the one grieving in the pew: loving; learning.

There is no difference between the living and the dead because the young have already been old, already taken a last breath, already watched planets die and galaxies collide.  In the end is the beginning.

Number Fifty Three

It is easy to see the darkness -- pain that cuts souls off from each other so they can feel only the "I," feel their aloneness. But the light, the slow movement of souls to point omega, is harder to recognize.  It is hidden by the illusion of detachment, our apparent separation from the whole. While the illusion is necessary for our lessons here, seeing that we are learning together growing together, is the first step toward spiritual liberation.

Number Fifty Two

In branches, on street corners, in familiar rooms are the ones watching over us.  They are visible and invisible.  They talk through the sounds of birds, they talk through falling water, through soft murmurs or an off-hand remark..

Yet we feel abandoned here, in the great silence of these dying, far-flung stars.  We feel alone in our bodies, in our death.  And we don't know our own angels, the ones who have loved us, the ones who surround us, both living and not.

We don't know our own angels.  We are deaf to their voice -- the wind in high granite, rain hitting the leaves, a sigh.  We can't see them when someone is waving, someone sleeps in a doorway, someone steps toward us for the embrace.

It's warmer and the birds arrive -- finally telling us everything.