Number Sixty

"I love you."  Words carry the idea of love, as if language made truth.  In the idea of love, loss has yet to happen.  In the idea of love, the form, the costume of connection is held up to the mirror -- perfect in every way.  But love lives in the intention, the commitment to reach across vast distances.  Love waits for word when word never comes, writes the letter that has nowhere to go, holds forever what is already gone.

Number Fifty Nine

Doubt is companion to the quest for certainty.  It never leaves because in this place absolute truth is hidden from us.  Mother Theresa spent most of her life with no sense of the presence of god.  And whether the god she thought exists is really there, this dialectic remains: the quest for truth and the uncertainty are inescabably one experience.

Is the struggle to find truth Quixotic, or do we get closer? We can observe the phenomena of consciousness; we can know the outcomes of choices; we can reason; we can collect data from the experiences of others.  And it all points somewhere, to some ineffable knowledge that comes for a moment into focus, and fades again.

We are like short-wave radios, tuned to a frequency of some distant voice, and through the static picking up a word or two.  And all the while we are sewing that into some coherence, knowing we only caught a little of the whole gestalt.  Knowing that, through desire or projection, we could supply the missing words and get most of it wrong.  And still...and still it is our work.  And we continue.

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.