I could stop writing blog posts right now. I wrote the first
post as an outlet to release the frustrations of dealing with my perception of
an unfair world. I kept writing because I found I had more to say. I kept
writing because I had lost my mother to cancer just a few weeks before my first
post. This year that we call two thousand and sixteen ends today. The naming of
the years is helpful in navigating our lives, but has no real basis in reality. Marking the trips our planet makes around an insignificant star in
an infinite cosmos is an act in futility. In the infinite, you cannot mark time
because there is no end and there is no beginning. Saying that I am writing my
last blog post would be a guess at this point. I have no idea if I will ever
type another sentence or draw another breath. And the cold hard reality and the
beautiful possibility is that none of us do.
Soon after I began dating the love of my life, she
introduced me to a film from 1971 called Harold and Maude. It’s known as a dark
comedy. It was a box office flop and panned by critics. It was seen as
distasteful and depressing. But I fell in love with this movie and more deeply
in love with the woman who first showed me the film. This movie challenges us
to rebel against conformity and to never settle for complacency. It teaches us
to embrace life and all of its potential, but also all of its challenges. It
assures us that change is what makes life beautiful and that includes death. As
the character Maude says, “It's all change. All revolving. Burials and births. The
end to the beginning and the beginning to the end.” But change is painful. How
can we find beauty in pain? It’s a question that artists, poets, scholars,
writers, clerics, and philosophers have attempted to portray an answer to since
the beginning of our conscious existence. I certainly do not have an answer. But
I understand that we must walk through the deepest and darkest forests to
emerge into the vast openness of the horizon that is always waiting for us
hanging over the sea filled with brilliant colors and light.
There is a scene in the movie Harold and Maude in which
Harold gives Maude a gift as they walk near the sea. She tells him it’s
beautiful and then she casts it wildly into the ocean. Harold looks startled. Maude says, “So, I’ll always know where it
is.” It’s an important moment in the movie. If casting a token of affection
into the vastness of the ocean means that it will never be lost, then how can
we lose anything? Or anyone? They are always there in the vastness of the
heavens. The token that Harold gave Maude now swishes about on the seabed, or
hangs upon some coral reef, maybe new life in the form of coral has now sprung
forth from it, or maybe it hitched a ride on the back of a sea turtle and
traveled to an exotic island where the local natives now see it as a sign from
a distant world. But the love expressed by that token remains with Maude. Our
loved ones that leave us travel the galaxies, adventure through the infinite,
but they remain with us. The true essence of who they were, are, and always
will be remain within us in the form of love.
Love never dies.
So to the year 2016 I say you have been my darkest stretch
of forest yet. I know it will grow darker still. But shafts of light have
already blasted through the crevices between the boughs and limbs overhead and
give me courage and hope to keep moving toward the constant light that is
always on the horizon.
