Lost in thought and daydreaming, he carelessly looked around, moving his eyes from the grass, to the birds, to the clouds; from the porch, to the house, to the pavement. Then his eyes landed on the large green leaves on the lawn. He looked up, realizing they had fallen from the giant tree next to the garage. It occurred to him that this tree was shedding leaves even though it was not Fall. He watched the tree as another group of leaves fell from the top. Then he realized: trees shed their leaves in Summer, not because they are dying, but because they are so filled with the sun that they are literally bursting with life. “That is how I want to live,” he thought.

–

She morphed into a cloud, floating in absence, through obscurity, no one there, and yet, there she remained.

–

For me one of the most important things was to realize that life has no time limits, there is no list of things that must be “checked off,” there is no final destination. You have to live without a care for where you end up or how you get there. You have to be present, content with the simple feeling of being alive, and when you do this, time will slowly come to halt; you’ll be puzzled by the dissidence of your momentum, wondering how it is you can go on after revolting, having thrown off the chains of your own impulses. But you’ll breathe again, only this time each breathe will ground you more firmly and with ever deeper roots into the constancy of the all pervading moment.

–

And so I search for the source of that feeling, finding it somewhere at the center of a great pulsation where the light of the universe refracts through an open stretch of darkness, a vast expanse that has lost any and all characteristics for the sake of transcendence.

–

“I was walking through the city. I passed an older woman with a sallow face, and exhausted eyes. She bore the look of quiet desperation. Seeing her, it dawned on me that everyone is trying their best with what they have, doing the most with what they can to live a happy life. After that, looking around, for some reason everyone I saw became more beautiful.”

–

Her real name is something foreign and irrelevant, but in my own mind I call her ‘The Black Rose,’ both for her black hair and for her stunning beauty, with eyes like caves, but not the part of the cave so distant from the opening that no light ever pierces it, but more like that part of a cave where, as one goes deeper, reaches that part where light will touch it for no more than a few steps. A cave is also an appropriate analogy, for it is a cave that contains dark recesses of space that no eye ever sees. Likewise, I will refrain from saying anything more of this woman, and will keep, like a cave, my thoughts somewhere within the dark recesses of my mind, at the risk of otherwise falling victim to my vulnerabilities and vices.

–

That strange time of year when the seasons seemed locked in ambiguity, when Spring can just as easily be Fall and Fall just as easily be Spring; when one knows not whether Spring is transitioning to Summer or Fall transitioning to Winter; when the cool crisp breezes of morning and night make it so, leaving one unsure where he or she is or where he or she is going, fooling one into thinking there is a choice in the matter; perhaps stemming from the seasons themselves, who, aware of the seeming lull between time, gain the desire to move from Spring to Winter or from Fall to Summer, all the while knowing deep down, that such choices are impossible.