Intimate Witness
A Elegy of Autumn
If we participate in the cycles of the seasons,
We bear intimate witness
As the first frost comes
We know the dying of the green world as if it is happening within.
We feel the turning season
as a loss of a million neighbors and friends.
after the frost they are all turned inward
Brown and lifeless.
This too, is a gift
bearing deep witness
to the phenomenon of death.
Every season is a season of impermanence
But the fall is the most conspicuous, the most honest
death is apparent in every assemblage.
We are walking among ten thousand prophecies of impermanence
In the stark branches
To the lifeless stalks,
And the empty nests.
The leaves leach from green to amber to colorless and transparent.
The rivers are stained with bleeding colors
Seeping out of the forests.
We can witness the dissolution
Of the many dreams of aliveness
Into the tannic waters.
Death is the alkahest, the universal solvent.
into which we pour all that we were.
We deliquesce.
We dissolve into other forms
We become fluid.
We become gold.
We become the ground from which the future emerges.
Among the ten thousand odes to impermanence
are the tomatoes in autumn.
some are hard, green, young
on the same stem, others are amber-gold.
The green ones will never mature
They will die on the stem
As the justice of the frost descends
onto the rainbow garden.
Not everything ripens.
Some lives will never even begin
Frozen in the process of development
like unborn children.
They did not grow into their fullness
but they have presence nonetheless
in the psychic terrain
that we all inhabit.
In an infinite universe
There must be room for the unexpressed
and space for every unseen presence.
and room for every cry to resonate
down the well of remembrance.
What is most sacred is not in our control.
It is beyond the grasp of the sensible.
When the veil is thinnest is when the night
As David Whyte says, “Has eyes to see its own”
Whatever seems lost is very close
It asks for our acknowledgment
It seeks an intimate witness
In the darkness of the soul.
Often we leave endings uncelebrated
and losses unspoken.
There is always something
Unknown, undone, unmanifest, seemingly broken.
Accept the inward turn
Acknowledge the dying back.
Cut your losses, grieve the many potentials
Which will never manifest.
Accept the one life that you will live.
And pray over the one death that is yours to experience.
A great shedding is happening
As every indwelling potential
Turns further inward.
Shed the false faces.
Release any identities
That kept you exiled from the fertile darkness.
We are not just here to prove or to perform or to make progress.
We are also here to peer into the void
And to befriend loss and lostness
And to live within the secret heart of limits
That are beyond reason
And seemingly without solace.
In the face of death,
there is no defense.
None of our resistance matters
There is no reassurance, no guarantee, no promises.
Readiness is irrelevant.
No matter when the time comes,
so much left undone, unfulfilled, undiscovered.
Embrace the gods of death
who will consume us regardless.
Embrace the unknown.
This too is a divinity,
a quintessence,
a necessary experience.
Death is not a flaw.
It's not a judgement.
It is a confluence,
it is a baptism.
Sometimes the most holy thing is the deliquescence
when form dissolves into darkness.
The body is an altar of impermanence.
All of us are promised to the unknown
that devours us.
and gnaws upon the bones
and casts away the skin
and swallows every remembrance.
We are cradled in the sensate
And when our time comes,
As far as we can go with our senses intact
As deep as our awareness extends,
we continue bearing intimate witness
to the phenomenon of death.
“Duende”
Made with: Cherry Tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum var. cerasiforme), Great Plains Yucca (Yucca glauca), Ground Cherry (Physalis pruinosa), Kaleidoscopic effect
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