After all the passion and desire, the anger, and the boredom, and life’s transient, ephemeral joys…after all the many needs that drive you—and the demands of the ego that feel like needs—when it all draws silently to its dreaded, long-awaited close…this is enough. Just this. Come to rest beneath the spruce trees in a quiet, snowy place.
Those mute wooded hills that observed so much of your living will hold you still when you return to the earth from which your substance is drawn. Winds pass above. Rivers freeze and thaw. Birds seek the radiance of a Guatemalan jungle, only for a season. They’ll return well before the sun and warmth because this is where they want to be. With all their avian hearts, they long for the hemlock and the maple and the oak. They pine for the pine—white pine, red pine. Though they fly away far, their mysterious birdling hearts bring them back to this place in the end.
“When the busy world is hushed, when the fever of life is o’er,” I think we return to the eternal consciousness that rests forever over the world’s silent places, like these. Frozen streams, snowy hills, bare trees—needing nothing, desiring nothing, regretting nothing, accepting all things. Just being. Peacefully, wordlessly, passionlessly being. Do we remember the turbulent, noisy, crowded, egotistical lives we left behind—with all their grasping and clinging? I don’t know. Maybe. Probably. Do we long for them like the birds long for hemlocks? I think not. I don’t know, but probably not… Isn’t this what we longed for all along, the freedom just to be?
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