Everything ends

Everything ends, everything. Seasons pass, and times fade. Grass sprouts, is young and green, strong and vigorous, blossoms, seeds itself, then crisps to golden straw before laying down for Winter rains. So many people -- so many! -- try to fight it. Deny it. Hang on. Prevent the fade. Clorox bleach keeps everything starchy white, sure -- starchy white and just a little more than threadbare.

But in the black sky, this globe of earth we are on is spinning, gently, slowly, imperceptibly almost, the only evidence the gravity we take for granted. Like a child, now and then, I stop, and squint, and try to look at the horizon and see if I can see it spin. Sure I can't see it, but that's no reason not to try. And every now and then -- crazy! Stupid! -- I swear that just for a moment I can see it. For the most infinitesimal second, I can see the ends coming.

And I'm okay with it, somehow. It's like the leaves of a book slowly getting less heavy in my hand as I turn the pages, and suddenly I can feel the hard back cover against my knuckles, and I know the next page, or maybe the page after that, is the last. Sure, it's over, and sometimes you wish you could go back and read it again. But it's a relief, too. It's an ending that is a beginning. It's release.

Once I thought I could predict every year. I knew, as each began, that it would be a year of change, or a year of growth, or a year of pain. Then I got sucked into the very depths of human folly and lost all notion of bearing. It was a kind of Apollonian, Artemisian clarity, that once sullied was a power that was no longer there. No longer can I predict my years. Yet of late I've felt something akin to that wisdom return, perhaps not so much knowledge anymore as instinct or perception. This, this is a year of Nos, a year of turning away, a year of closing. It is no one thing, but many things, and each has a similar theme, like a kitchen where every dish is spiced the same. Yet each closing, each writing of a living epilogue, is also, somehow, a relief, and a release, and maybe something more. And change is impossible without letting go of the reigns of life, and sometimes even of desire, and of hope.