Monday, December 31, 2007
New Years: The Other End of the Earth
Penobscot Bay, from Caterpillar Hill (click on photo above for better view)New Years is a time when we are more aware of endings and beginnings. And so I have come to the end of this story.
We Buddhists know that only this moment is real, the rest is memory and illusion and hopes and "just our idea". (The hard part is remembering that in each moment.) I have so many memories of this year. Reading back over the notes I made about it in this blog, there is a lot that wasn't included, and maybe some things that should have been left out. But it is what it is, and I hope you've enjoyed it and that it's made you think.
As for me, I'm ending this year both an entirely different person and perhaps more comfortably the person that I always was.
Everything changes, and after being in Maine only 11 days or so, I would say the Coast of Maine is a temple to that principle. The sea air and weather change minute to minute, the smells vary from conifer to dirt/earth, to fish guts to fresh clear wind which is the smell of nothing at all. A day here has no end or beginning, but is part of a recurring cycle as tides come in and out, sun goes up and down, clouds blow over; always the same yet ever different.
Our own sea change continues, but hopefully at a slower pace. I will start my new practice this week. More new beginings, but with a difference: this time there are no endings foreseen. Time will tell. Already I feel the slower rhythms of Island life, as I learn to wait patiently in the Post Office, while the Postmaster and her customer compare earrings received as Christmas presents; as people stop to chat in the middle of the street; as I pick up a hitchhiking clamdigger in an early morning snowstorm. Time is slower here. And that is ok.
We began being lost and changed. We went to the End of the Earth. And now we have returned, to the Other End of the Earth. No matter where we go, we are standing on the Edge. And that is as it should be. Looking out from the hill above Stonington; over the waves, wind and sky spread before us; Vicki and I talk about all the islands we might explore. Each new moment is a seed, pregnant with possibilities, as we walk backwards into the future.
I began this blog with a quote from Robert Charles Wilson. I will end with another, from Spin, the book I started on the plane ride home and just finished last night:
"A transition is only a door...A door into a room. A room you've never been in, though you might have caught a glimpse of it from time to time. Now it's the room where you live; it's yours, it belongs to you. It has certain qualities you can't change- you can't make it bigger or smaller. But how you furnish it is up to you."
