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Endings and Beginnings
I sit on the shores of a windswept beach. The birds circle overhead in the light of the blinding sun. Their caws and cackles remind me of impermanence—life and death, and the ubiquitous need that scatters the horizon between.
They fight, sing, and descend upon the carcass laid bare on the beach. Its once beautiful features indiscernible now. They all feed upon it blinded by their need, seeing only what they want to see. Thinking that feeding upon this will somehow set them free, make them worthy of being, or life somehow more worth living.
My soul is quiet as it contemplates the pungent aftertaste from the swallows of my need. The transgressions of my own blindness and fury. Weighing in unknowing balance the vibrant truth revealed in my dreams contrasted by my own making of a black and white reality.
I am half spirit and half human. And these two are always battling within. Today, it is the human in me that rejects hurting and wins. Even as my soul knows it was meant to weave a wayward path towards healing. Even as I know it was fated and I was divinely led. Still, I sit in solemn silence, unmoved. For every win contains a loss, and every loss contains a win.
I reflect on all the time I spent chasing that which I already had within me. When I gave away too freely what was mine to keep. I see the lessons that in grief felt wasted. Yet I know, it isn’t those moments, people, or hurts that are the waste. It is the totality of all the time that I have let slip by, living anything less than a whole life. A battle I still seemingly fight.
It is but a short journey we have here floating free in the cosmos, on this spinning rock of blue held together by these atoms and this awareness. I think of the unfathomable oblivion that paved the road to my being here now, and the unending span of it that lay in wait when I leave this conscious space.
I think of the atoms that have been recycled for eons into this and that, and them and me. I feel in this my connectedness to everything. I realize I am just recycled bits of all the love and life that ever existed. I think of who these parts will create when I am gone. I wonder if they will feel my presence in them as I do all those that came before.
