Light and shadow ... moving time,
life here - bursting from inanimate matter.
A small pool or mirror, I.
Colette told me that the buds on her White Birch tree
were just coming out
when she went in to have her first child.
And that, when she returned some days later,
with a new life in her arms,
the buds had turned to flowers.
And every year since, she and this tree have communed
in the memory of that day.
Such stories run in the literature I've read
and through the memories in my mind.
Stories of people whose entire lives were written
within the seasons of the land they lived on.
Their lives rising and falling, rising and falling
through the eternal sunrises and sunsets
that swept across the fields they tended.
There were children born there
that played beneath those trees.
And they arose, lived and then became
just the memories
of those who live there now.
Now, amid the relentless turning
of these endless years.
Our faces are growing older
and fading in the mirrors now
as we witness all of this
again and again.
I grow more like a reflecting pool
and less like a believer
as I look at all of those I love in this life
transiting through this life
and I see them, and I see all of us,
as just passing through this place
like curtains in the wind.
Just living pools, reflecting ...
and mirrors of awareness, hoping ...
We are those, who realize,
only towards the end of at all, if at all,
that we are the transient ones
on this stage of mystery.
gallagher
14Sep2014
Christchurch
— Copyright 1965-2014 by Dennis Gallagher —
You are so awesome and I’m so grateful to have you in my life! I pictured myself sitting beside that silver birch as I was reading.