As Petals Fade

As petals fade pale pink and fall,
more delicate than before,
so is there beauty in the twilight of love,
which moves us even now 
to take all in (and then out).

Time flows to lovers as a warm breeze.
Let the warmth be an urgency and a blanket.
Let us hold each other as if we’re falling.

For love must be a surrender, a fall:
It is to say, “This power you have over me
is there whether I grant it or not.”

And in this surrender, release.

Whatever I have seen of heaven,
          I have seen with you.

A friend recently asked me about the topic of grieving and the nature of time. I would like to share my reflections here.

The way I have incorporated grieving since my grandmother passed is that she was always in a process of mutual becoming with me and my loved ones, and so we carry her forward. We shaped each other into being, and her influence will continue to shape our becoming.

In a very real sense, then, we carry her forward. However, I know that that can be small consolation in times of grief; and it is best to allow the emotions to arise as they will and to give oneself grace to feel what they may without judgment.

I have a lot of thoughts on the nature of time. I would point the interested reader you to Einstein’s general relativity and Kant’s idea that space and time are preconditions for any experience or perception to occur at all.

But more poetically, I believe that time fundamentally enables love. Time, like space, is a way that we can demarcate the boundary between self and Other. We’re always dividing that great Whatever-There-Is-Out-There into our “self” and the “Other,” and what unfolds in time is the dance or drama between our self and that Other.

So time is fundamentally an opportunity for love; for seeing that we are not truly separate from Other, but mutually conceptualized with it and engaged in an ongoing dance or dialogue.

I think that the meaning of life is that anything should have meaning at all. Time gives us that opportunity to make something out of nothing.