The eternal question

 

 

 

  

LAST LEAF

Last leaf falling from the twiggered arms

 of wintered tree, riding soulful, senseless,

 down to waiting ground; dried breath of

 seasons, crinkled edge and colour dying,

 

 so do we all, follow, in slow, descending

 footsteps, toward the beckoning grave,

 into the bosom of deathly night, where

 the sun shines brighter in that blackness,

 

 and shuddering forgetting takes hold, to

 soothe the pain of relentless years, and

 to whisper again, those songs we once

 knew, and could sing, but had forgotten.

The bard was s/he who wrote heroic poetry, as a way of making sense and meaning in the world and recording information for the future. It was a poetic pathway, often byway, which led the individual and the community forward into possible futures.

As the years pass, life presents more byways than pathways I am finding, and this is an encouraging, a wandering into and through experiences with a greater focus on the here and now than the projected future. Perhaps that is because there is a shorter projected future, or perhaps it is because in the last decades of life, we are called to wander, soften, maybe even become lost in ways we would not and could not have allowed in our young and middle years.

And yet the Self within feels the same, the compass remains true and it is only the outer scenery which changes and the stories that we tell ourselves about it.

What is this constant sense of ‘I’? That feeling of being-ness which is other than others, not necessarily separated but separate in the sense of the individuality – not you, not that, not anything but I, even though, at times, the I can become as one with you, that, or anything?