I know these trees.
In my youth I climbed them.
I saw the buds blossom in the spring.
I watched the leaves drift off to decay in the Autumn.
I hear them die in the winter.
My favorite one is now gone.
I wept as if I'd lost a sibling.
I spent days on it's massive limb that hung out over the lake reading. I read Lord of the rings, Chronicles of Narnia, The foundation series, and many other books that influenced my life and my mind. I spent countless hours in its comfortable embrace contemplating the meaning of life and the secrets of the universe, formulating infinity and my place or lack of place with in it.
I cried over lost loves.
I laughed over memories passed.
I lamented the present and hoped for the future.
I sketched the things happening around me and sang to the still water.
I never thought that it would all be gone some day and just a memory.
My tree is now a hole in the ground being filled in with screened dirt by two dark skinned laborers.
Their skin like mine, scarred by years of the elements relentless March.
It was my good place.
My safe place.
My Walden pond.
My Mecca.
The loss of this icon to so many, made me truly realize that nothing lasts forever and that now is all we really have. People will say, " you have your memories." but those memories are being remembered and relived by you in the now. Your thoughts, hopes and dreams are uplifting or putting you down in the present.
This is it.
All there is, is in this very moment and then the next.
What does this mean?
Does the past not exist?
Is the future a fiction?
An animal doesn't think of these things, so why do we?
Is it some sort of fresh hell in which we baste ourselves over the hot brim stones of hell?
Are we our own devil and executioner?
Are we our own angel and deliverance?
Yes and yes.
We are both good and evil.
We are balance and checks.
Infinity and eternal nirvana lies within living this realization.
Carpe diem!
I spent most of my life trying to push down parts of me that makes me
me. I spent years trying to be a better person.
The best person I can be is the one that I was made to be,
right or wrong.
Good or bad.
These are all human concepts to add meaning to the concept of time.
I watch as an older couple walks by holding hands. They seem much more ancient than the tree was. They tentatively step around the remains, exchanging stories.
Memories.
Their children probably climbed it as I did when they were young.
They remember the simpler times and smile. They revel in the warm shower of memories.
They were younger too.
More recently, their grandchildren climbed the same limbs, only their parents take family selfies and film with their phones what their parents keep in deep thought as clear as any picture.
They laugh at their childrens generation and can only shake their heads and wonder.
A tear runs down the woman's wrinkled face as joggers run by with out a glance or care.
They have no knowledge of the beauty and wonder that once stood here. They are unaware of the generations of life that once proudly stood in this very spot.
It is now lost in the ocean of a perpetual forward moving tide.
It's moment has been washed out to sea and will be forgotten.
The landscape and backdrop seems foreign to me. It's as if I have slipped into another dimension where things are just slightly different, but different enough to feel a sense of loss and displacement.
There is no great shadow there any longer.
There is no longer a mile marker.
Nature does not have such a romantic notion of such things.
The leaves turn and die again, the buds return every year until the vessel is no more.
Time marches on.
We document.
We remember.
We try desperately to pass on these memories.
We try in vain.
Inevitably we will fail.
The life maybe remembers , but the details are tossed like Autumn leaves.
There will be no funeral.
There will be no procession.
Only private tears and solitary prayers.
Only our memories that are now.



I'm not counting my words.