they go, they leave, and they do not come back
until it happens they are in a process of going everyone else is in a state of holding on
and then they leave
and they do not return
not ever
no matter how much you plead or rage or weep
and it is the unfathomable truth that we are forced to try to wrap ourselves around, as trying to thin oneself out to the flattest, to be one atom thick all the way across and like a parachute catch the wind and try to hold it for a moment, and float back down and lay our body over a building draped as a tablecloth over the entire frame underneath the entire feast
but we cannot hold with our hands or our bodies the whole wind or hold any wind at all. and the cloth does not become the table and when they leave they are gone gone gone and they do not come back
and it is the undeniable truth around which we have, must, shape reality.
you can make a choice to shape and move your life and your world in as much acceptance of this truth as you can regularly hold, which i would say is a stone in a pocket, that is the amount each of us could hold. that is enough to keep one another comforted and in perspective and respected and given space and given patience. one stone enough to put our hand in our pocket and rub to remember through out the day passing others doing the same. remembering the past and passed rubbing a stone in your pocket in a world of others smiling and loving or singing or letting a single tear roll down their cheek while they rub a single stone holding all the joy and all the grief, held in their pocket. that is all it would take, all we could take.
or you can deny deny deny. look around and see what happens when you choose to deny what it is to transmogrify. what is the only certainty of this life. when we reject death, we reject living too.
me, you, anyone you ever pass, ever meet, too.
some lives, some people (soma and soul entwined but not necessarily in harmony) earn something in the course of their time here. i do not think the earning is equivalent to suffering but there is clearly some kind of correlation with the appearance of suffering and relinquishing an emotional attachment to it.
probably every energetic being earns during their time here. this is karma with some measure of simplicity, without social or religious implications. the process that you make choices and those choices meet repercussions that may not fit into human-conceived, thus human-centered, logic. but it follows some call and response of the comings and goings and pushing and pullings of the universe too big and too small to perceive from this form.
some people just become that earning though. just embody it. embodiment is not a badge or hubris morphed into entitlement. embodiment is full integration, so that it is no longer an emotional apparatus but instead a part of ones entirety that was not a part of that energetic cloud when it came into the world. it is the harmony of soma and soul. it is a learning by being and a becoming by surrender. this often looks to those on the outside, in other body / spirit combinations, as just the opposite: as absolute struggle and resistance against the forces of the constructed three-dimensional reality. against the forces (disharmonious) that make having a body so much more difficult than it already is. embodiment is living and to continue to live in a world unconcerned about all life, maybe even especially yours, is an acceptance of the right to be, to be in a body, and to experience what you need to for your soul to grow which is an eternal sort of rite. to embody is to accept death as much as to accept life.
to recognize that the salt on your food and the wood of the table at which you eat and the wool of your socks and the rays of the sun creeping at the edges of your mug of tea through the afternoon window are all particulates of life shifted shape that now give your life sensation and meaning and evolution.
when they go they, who we knew, do not come back
but somewhere on the other side of time or space or the earth or the window pane out which you glazed-gaze past their empty chair, the wind shifts and picks up a new channel of breath and continues on with the rest of the living, animating - which is literally to give breath to - the world in which we are all still in the same form. and as we stare inward and stretch ourselves so thin to be a drum-skin over that black hole of grief, the wind will hold and everything in that moment is whole. so we take a deep breath and they are there in our lungs, just as everyone else who has been loved and left breathed the air of the ones they loved and were left by. there in that thin balloon tissue that holds air in the ways we wish our bodies to but cannot; there you can find them, all of them, in your chest and breath.
and what, what, what could be more living and dying, more embodied than that.
breath. left. air. it. returns.
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