PERPETUAL DUST: MEDITATIONS ON A CHRISTMAS TREE
I decided to dive into making some goals for 2020. I made myself a cup of hot chocolate and sat by my Christmas tree. As I warmed to the task, I was distracted by the tree’s beauty.
Like so many people, I have many cherished ornaments filling the branches. Each one is a story that fills my heart, connecting me to people I love.
I was enjoying those ornaments when a troubling thought wedged in my mind: their stories die with me! That little crystal ornament, for instance, the one that brings me to tears of joy and pangs of loss will be just a pretty ornament someday. An ornament without a storyteller.
I have boxes of letters from ancestors. I save them, but I don’t read them. These soft whispers from lost generations are silently poised in cigar boxes. Forgotten.
People are not remembered. Maybe some tidbit, a remnant of their being, may survive for awhile. But that is just a pathetic artifact of the once vibrant, loving, living person whose memory surely fades away from us.
To be remembered, let’s have our name on a building. On a business. On a book.
No. It is impossible. It is ego fighting against annihilation.
We can’t cheat this impending fate. It will swallow us. And eventually it will swallow the people who remembered us. For certain and forever, we are erased.
Sitting by the Christmas tree, I decide there is wisdom in this. If I was God, I would do the same. Dust to dust. What we are in between dies every moment when the next moment is born. We are perpetual dust. Animated for a brief moment in a construct called time.
Who remembers dust?
Who remembers the path it floats in the breeze of your breath?
Or where it lands?
I have decided not to know.
I am too old now to need answers.
Uncertainty is dust’s friend.
New Years Resolutions are feeling pretty vain to me right now.
I think I’ll just take another sip and enjoy these memories until they fade.
In the meantime, I wish you a "Happy New Moment."
“Everything lasts for a day, the one who remembers and the remembered.”