she's gone

Falling into life's rhythms

“memento mori” PC: Reena Kapoor (c)2023. Instagram @1stardusty

she’s gone

Ever so slowly she lets my hand go

I feel her caress my fingers, my palm

I see her vanishing, slipping away 

She's all I want, I try to hold on

*

She whispers I'll be back here soon 

Keep the Sun, and life's heart young 

Plant those dreams, wait for me 

Bask under the sky, stare long at the moon

*

And like a wisp of fragrance...she is gone 

I'm left in a shiver, a longing deep 

Still I smile; on her promises I dwell each day 

A crisp bright wind carries me along 

*

The fires, they crackle, the lights arrive

Pagan rituals warm up this hearth 

I'll await your return, Summer 

While with steely resolve, reflect your light

###

Reena | from my book Arrivals & Departures: Journeys in Poems

I wrote this poem a long time ago but it feels right every year, this time of year. Summer bids goodbye. We hold on, trying to keep her here. Autumn arrives inexorably leading us to winter. How it is, always has been and always will be even when the last of us is long gone. A sobering, but also comforting thought.

We’re here, a part of this grand humanity within nature, and we’ll leave, and still be a part of it.

At a certain age you start to notice the seasons even more. I know I do. Fall reminds me of the fall of life. We’re all “designed” (emergent with human life) to know how life progresses, where it’s headed, and yet we’re able to forget it most of the time. I don’t know if part of that is our hubris. But more likely it’s survival: that steady subconscious hum “it’s not coming for me”.

That’s not all bad. After all, what would we do if we were fully consumed with such dour contemplation? We’d get nothing done, forever spinning from one obsession to the next in a frenzied search for short-handed meaning.

At the same time, without a clear-headed notion of the limits of our presence, we endanger frittering our precious attentions on the minutiae, the unimportant, the meaningless.

The Stoics advised that we contemplate death every day: Memento mori translating to remember that you will die. While that may sound like a depressing practice, it makes sense. Because we’re designed to forget death’s omnipresence, instead behaving as if we have all the time in the world, making vague promises of showing up “soon” for our loved ones, even for ourselves.

Instead, acting courageously on our life’s values and priorities alongwith and despite such daily contemplation, is the stuff of heroism. Within that balance virtue is found.

When I don’t know what makes sense I try to reject extremes, instead looking for contradictions to live by. I usually get there by broadening the context of the question. For the above question, I’ve always loved this quote:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow; learn as if you were to live forever —Mahatma Gandhi

Life and seasons don’t ask for permission. They march on. For all of us. And that’s OK.