It’s the generic times that go on without intention or notice. The minutes we squander with our endless doing. They add up and in my mind I am a young girl again listening to the ominous warning coming from the TV.
At five years old before my parents had
liberated our household from the Boob
Tube, (as my stepfather referred to it) my mom had a standing date with the
soap opera, Days of Our Lives. “As sands through the hourglass, so are the
days of our lives” would reverberate through our house like a gong, rooting
into the fissures of what I would someday be, I was shaped.
These days I'm doing the grown up duties. I’m making to-do lists of food shopping and errands to run, when suddenly the mundane is punctured by the stabbing truth of my
own mortality. The acrid pause of dry mouth and halted breath violently sucks
me out of the trance of the undead. I’m a cockroach fleeing from the
fluorescent light of “What the fuck are you doing with your life?”. That
momentous shredding of common day reality visits me often, rendering me a
child, who has been spanked and sent to my room to think about it.
But right now, we stand on sacred and holy ground, for that which will be lost has not yet been lost, and realizing this is the key to unspeakable joy. Whoever or whatever is in your life right now has not yet been taken away from you. This may sound trivial, obvious, like nothing, but really it is the key to everything, the why and how and wherefore of existence. Impermanence has already rendered everything and everyone around you so deeply holy and significant and worthy of your heartbreaking gratitude.
Loss has already transfigured your life into an altar."
