What we endure
Tonight, I feel patient with myself.
As I look out my window upon the
city, I want to look at the people --
all of them -- with patient eyes.
What we have endured is endless.
It has a distant beginning and an
unknown distant end.
We have all arrived, planned or
unexpectedly in love. In sadness.
In fear. And we have begun
from the rawness of our parents
who too began in that same rawness
that was different when they
became.
We have become, and are becoming
always -- then, now, tomorrow.
We have endured the weight of
time for days and weeks and hours
and seconds, alive in our frustration
with this existence that we have
entered and that we are and must be.
We have built homes with our hands
and watched them fall to the earth in
fragments. We have created in love
and we have destroyed that which we
created in love in order to salvage the
same love that we will ultimately destroy.
We have weathered the cycle of seasons
that bear ripe fruit and seasons that
rip trees from their roots, of winters
that freeze the land and torment the
living with incessant cold. Of summers
that envelop us in thick humid air and
make us think of simple pleasures.
Of springs that renew that which has
suffered long and invites growth
from ruins.
We have endured loss because it
is a part of us all. We exist in the
remains of each and every loss,
must rebuild ourselves with the
remnants of what we had -- if any
such remain -- and create ourselves
again as but a part of what was whole.
We look into mirrors and we see who
we are now without and with what is.
We have given so much, all, fast
and earnestly in desire or in fear,
shared what was only ours, but will
never be ours only again. And we take
and we take because we crave, because
we are afraid of the thirst that
threatens us always.
I think tonight of what we have endured.
And it is because I know all of it
that I am patient with myself.
As I look out my window upon the
city, I want to look at the people --
all of them -- with patient eyes.
What we have endured is endless.
It has a distant beginning and an
unknown distant end.
We have all arrived, planned or
unexpectedly in love. In sadness.
In fear. And we have begun
from the rawness of our parents
who too began in that same rawness
that was different when they
became.
We have become, and are becoming
always -- then, now, tomorrow.
We have endured the weight of
time for days and weeks and hours
and seconds, alive in our frustration
with this existence that we have
entered and that we are and must be.
We have built homes with our hands
and watched them fall to the earth in
fragments. We have created in love
and we have destroyed that which we
created in love in order to salvage the
same love that we will ultimately destroy.
We have weathered the cycle of seasons
that bear ripe fruit and seasons that
rip trees from their roots, of winters
that freeze the land and torment the
living with incessant cold. Of summers
that envelop us in thick humid air and
make us think of simple pleasures.
Of springs that renew that which has
suffered long and invites growth
from ruins.
We have endured loss because it
is a part of us all. We exist in the
remains of each and every loss,
must rebuild ourselves with the
remnants of what we had -- if any
such remain -- and create ourselves
again as but a part of what was whole.
We look into mirrors and we see who
we are now without and with what is.
We have given so much, all, fast
and earnestly in desire or in fear,
shared what was only ours, but will
never be ours only again. And we take
and we take because we crave, because
we are afraid of the thirst that
threatens us always.
I think tonight of what we have endured.
And it is because I know all of it
that I am patient with myself.