There are questions that seem to come up again and again in this odyssey, like echoes which ripple through time or perennials that cast their uplifted flowery heads each spring. Questions like, can I cast aside this veil of the false-self and just be without fear of consequence? Can I ever love myself without necessitating validation from someone else? Can I break the parental paradigm and provide my children with the emotional support and loving kindness that was denied me? Can I embrace the dissonance in life, call it my own, and salve it with love and compassion? Can I understand the why of me? Will this dharma path that I walk lead to nirvana – and knowing myself as God?
For many years I ignored these burning existential questions – hoping they would ebb away and become lost in a life replete with multitudinous doings or, perhaps, be answered through the evocation of direct experience. For life is filled with unimaginable beauty and – at the same time – great sadness. That sadness comes from knowing that all is temporary, all is impermanent. The garden of my youth now belongs, perhaps as it should, to another. The beautiful and wild (at least to my imagination) woods behind my childhood home – filled with thick brown peat and green moss, clinging vines and thorn-studded bushes, fallen trees and small animals – became large holes in the earth where the sand for Manhattan was carved. Later, suburban cheese boxes sprung from the ground like ordinary mushrooms.
In the same way, my first true love is now but a faded memory – a phantom. When I look back at the photographs the images reflect her brown-eyed innocence and beauty, yet betray the tragedy of her own emptiness and lack of self-knowledge. For a love that touched my soul so deep, it is but one snowflake in a lifetime of blizzards now melted.
All ends, yet all begins again…
