Number Fifteen

We speak of spending time as if time were a bag of coins.  A kind of wealth that someday will be lost.  Death makes time look finite, something we run out of.

Time is change.  Without change there is no way to mark time -- whether measured by the drifting of continents or the moving hands of a clock.  In the physical world, time is the movement or breaking down and recombining of molecules. For souls, time is measured by what is learned -- the transformation from empty slate to a holder of knowledge.

Death can't stop time for the soul.  Souls collectively hold all of experience, gathering everything that is or will be known.  Souls are the books in a library that is god.  Each book continually grows, changes.  It never stops, and time goes on.

Number Fourteen

Desire and detachment live next to each other.  Both beautiful and necessary.  The required dialectic for a complete life.  Desire without detachment is a runaway train, allowing no acceptance of loss, no love for a world that can refuse our deepest hope.  Detachment without desire creates the eternal observer -- appreciating, accepting, forever letting go.  But never holding, seeking, wanting.

So it is at the intersection of detachment and desire that the beautiful uncertainty lives.  Daring to seek while accepting Fate's unknowable plan.  Wanting to hold the beloved while sensing all around the forces of separation.  A desire to shape the future with a letting go to what the future brings.  Embracing what is held and what is lost; taking what arrives at each moment, however sadly and beautifully different from what we sought.