A Circular Journey

I stand on the edge of a great precipice. The end of something old, the beginning of something new. I have only to choose. To step backwards, or ahead to an unknown future, only I can decide. How will I react to what is placed within my care; What has been put into my lap? A new role I play in this life. An ever-rolling tide of decisions and reactions to life. Ever changing, life does not pause, even for a moment. We take our breaks, but life does not, it goes on with or without us. Constant death of what came before and renewal, rebirth into what comes next. As I stood on that ledge staring into the deep gorge below, I noticed in my quietness only the sound of birds and bugs buzzing, wings flapping, flowers and grass growing. Life, movement in my stillness. In April of 2008, there on that ledge in the southeast of Italy, crying, I thought of my father; of how death means not only an end, but a beginning- A continuity of ourselves in ever-shifting form. Are we not always changing? Faced with a new self each day? Faced with a new choice, a new place, a surprise around every bend? When I used to think of "FOREVER", I thought in lines. I perceived time in a line... A baby grows, becomes an adult and dies. It may feel, at times, that the loss of a loved one leaves a deep gorge in our hearts, but after watching my father pass, I began to perceive time as a circle, never ending, infinite. There is no measurement, for we never see an actual end. Yes , we may see a body disintegrate, its' organs slowly stop working, a brain deteriorate, a heart stop beating; yet what is truly inside all of that, the part of us that cannot be seen, touched, or operated on, well no one sees the end of that. No one knows where it has gone. No one can honestly say they know anything about that. Some of us may try to explain it away, have some answer or book to point at, yet no one has static proof af any true knowledge. All I can say is that we "feel" things. We feel them deeper than our skin, deeper than our bones, muscles, veins, and organs. We "know" of things beyond us, somehow, somewhere. And the circle I perceive is part of that "knowing" that "feeling" that goes on and permeates our being as we stand in a room watching a body fail to breathe, watching the light fade from a pair of eyes we've stared into countless times in this physical journey, yet knowing that the life behind those eyes has not died. With this knowledge I continue my own journey, as I stand now a mother, a wife and a soul seeking its' calling- a pursuit that never ends.