As They Let Go Their Leaves

Now the mornings bring condensation along the edges of windowsills. Although the sun is hot on my face at the height of afternoon, I notice cool breezes. Evenings come sooner, and my longings return. I look for some indication among the maple trees. The ones that have suffered distress have already started. Their leaves are turning yellow and red. Some have fallen. They have fallen and started to curl, their edges are brown. I say to myself, "That tree is ill, that's why." I look to other maples still green, but I lie to myself, "It is the height of Summer, the skies are blue, It's sunny and warm." I try not to notice the traces of yellow found in even the healthy trees. The ones that have lost their leaves litter the ground. Winds arise and whisk their leaves away to who knows where, off to some corner with other debris, perhaps remembered by the trees, but forgotten by the world. There the leaves might dance a final dizzy waltz before they crumble utterly away. Inside me it's Summer still where nothing can touch it, perhaps a Summer not yet realized, that maples dream of as they lose their leaves and anticipate conceiving next year's buds at the tips of their branches, a Summer which one must once again surrender, and replace with hope for another time. When Winter comes naked branches, still alive, rattle in fierce gales. The branches wait out the cold dark days, the long bitter nights, because they understand that time will pass. They are accustomed to Winter, and have learned to endure it. Do maples hope? They know in their way that though there is a season when life is hard, when merely to exist at all is a struggle, another season will come. I look to the maples as they let go their leaves.

Forgotten

It rent everything asunder, and the waves of the endless sea beat against that which was in ruin and after a time of what seemed like many years it washed it all away, until like in the beginning there was nothing, and in the nothingness there was stillness and the stillness brought with it peace, and so I sat in the peace and in the stillness and lost all concept of time, because after all there is an eternity of time, and beginning and end know not one of the other, and so the measure of time is meaningless. I sat in the peace of that meaninglessness, listening in silence to the stillness broken only by the slow cadence of the waves beating and receding back into the endless fathomless sea. If a tear fell into that sea, none would know save the maker of that sea, and none would care except again He who had created me, but He is slow moving, He who knows the depths of eternity, and if he who shed the tear should doze by that sea for a time, what is that to Him? And what is that to me? Odd it seems, for now I have forgotten.

Grasping Butterflies

One fine sunny day I saw a butterfly flitting amongst the daisies of a field. I held out my hand and it came to light upon my finger. I watched it there, the most beautiful of God’s creations, and as it slowly batted its wings I thought that I might capture it and have that beauty for my own. So I grasped it in my grip, and there it struggled. I was so taken by its beauty that I did not see that I was killing it. At last it almost died, but God gives wisdom to butterflies as well as men. In a flurry of struggle it slipped from my grasp and flew into my face. I felt its wings tickling my cheek. Even then I could have grasped it, but I knew that if I did then it would destroy everything, and all the beauty that I loved would fade away. So I let it go because after all that which is beautiful can never be held. God makes life so delicate so that we may have it for a second and no more. I want the things that I can’t have, yet sometimes God gives them to me in dreams. Dreams that make me weep, alone and silently, so that no one sees I do, sometimes in sadness but more often with joy.

Hey You

There are about a hundred thousand billion things I want to tell you. Always meaning to start right here but starting there and there and there instead, stories I've wanted to tell others who never seemed to really care, stories like the time I saved a pheasant's life, or how I almost fell from a log I was crossing 30 ft in the air, stories that come one after the other, like waves that beat upon the shore, thundering as they break, shattering into a million pieces, that wash back into the sea which after all is endless. I want to tell you three at once, or six, or nine. Starting, wanting to tell you something that always seems to slip from grasp, trying to tell a hundred times the same story and never once telling it, not because it is difficult but because I want to tell you everything at once.