Seasons

Yes, my friend, thank you. Autumn has driven many leaves to change their color and to fall, silent victims to the annual change and the insistent internal whispering of unalterable cycles of life and death.

We are fond of comparing ourselves to trees, wherein our lives mirror in some ways the patterns they reveal to us with their deciduous dance. But they have many such seasons, sometimes repeating for hundreds of years, as though for them there is no identifiable conclusion.

The spring, summer, fall, and winter of our lives, should we chance to live them all, occur but once. Is there a sweeter truth in shorter times enjoyed with convoluted brains and languages to question? Or is there a greater grandeur in the span that is to be found among the silent, but longest living examples of life’s stubborn persistence on our planet?

I wonder about many things, and know that most of my questions shall remain largely unanswered, enduring beyond and without my greater satisfaction or contentment. Perhaps the best that we may do is to coexist peacefully with those few things that we seem to comprehend, rather than seeking resolution to those issues that tower above all others in some form of final importance.

It would seem that we must remain reconciled to the glory of insights that deliver to us knowledge of the movement and birth of planets and solar systems and stars, while remaining largely ignorant about the nature of our own particular existence and consciousness itself.

A part of me is envious of pagan simplicities, which provide puerile explanations for all of life’s vexing mysteries, both large and small. It is a state of mind that is calm in it’s certainty, and simple in its scope. But it allows its adherents to move in an easy rhythm to the patterns that they find about them in a way that satisfies their place within the structure of the natural world; living without conflict with the many gods who can never be known, but who know all, and whose beneficence and approbation they solicit through supplication and sacrifice to obtain and to appease.

This week I sat within a ragged, forlorn circle of mothers and fathers whose sons and daughters were dead, and who searched both the heavens they imagined and the personal hells that they inhabit, for premonitions and explanations that might satisfy some small space within their larger yearning for sense within the nonsensical, for comfort in disruptive misery.

Time and again they embraced the fanciful instead of fact, the dreamy satisfaction of coincidence as solid evidence of signs and wonders of extrasensory signals from a world where all the departed live peacefully, blissfully forever, and suffering has no foothold.

And I saw children, and I saw myself, and I knew that I was neither a child who believes in fairy tales, nor an adult who remained certain of anything. My son’s battered, bipolar body would never be whole, and my soul and my body wept with a sorrow that will never be assuaged, and with an empty heart that can never be filled.