Lingerings

Today is a good day to meet my love.

Sun comes flickering through leaves, clinging with their frail stems to quiet, crooked limbs.

Some lose their tenacious grip

and flutter furiously through air, as though cast out, finally released, useless and free.

Curled up, crisp dry, and tinted by death.

Joining their shadows on the warm pavement.

It’s been their time a long while. 

And with the sunshine on my face as I cycle down gentle city streets, never do I feel more intensely and rapturously the promise of death, of endings, of lettings go and movings on. 

Never do I see more plainly the illness inside long lingerings with things truly over, more clearly our mistakes so human we simply can’t help ourselves from making them. 

Never am I more aware of that secret place, housing our tragic understanding that longings keep us closer to the thing we grieve and further away from a new start.

Yet here we too often find ourselves, unable to drop and trust nature to lead the way or trust instinct to map our course.

It is the weight of the ultimate freedom, that request to surrender.

But we’re getting closer,

with the felt sense that it’s time to go, to move, to look ahead,

all the while stopping to notice the raw, naked world all around. 

If lingerings with the past must stay, invite them into the present. 

Open that door for the cost of admission: acceptance, forgiveness, grace, love.

And with the wind in my hair, I watch the leaves swirl down and sweep the pavement in their act of grace, as though kissing their new home hello, 

relenting to its offer to hold, to catch, to carry their transition from then to now.

Soon they will, soon they will.