letting go

here i am again. preparing to write, i know not what. to, i know not whom. a line from this morning's liturgy struck my heart:

you have taken from me my lovers, friends, and acquaintances.

how deeply i know this line. how i have felt the departure of each lover, friend, acquaintance. how i feel them now, so many who have left, whom i have had to let go. when i watch the trees and leaves cascade from the heights, the thing that always impresses me is,

they know when to let go.

i do not. if i were i tree, i'd be a very neurotic tree.

why did you leave me? why did you go? i loved you.

thus, i would likely be an evergreen, wearing a drab foliage of faithful pines, bedecked with cones who drape like ornaments from my gently sagging boughs.

yes, if i were a tree, i'd likely be an evergreen.

not the even calculated symmetry of a blue spruce, but the haphazard pine.

you could make baskets of my needles, feast on my tender fruits, shelter under my boughs in a storm. and i would grow high above terra firma, though my roots would be deep.

i could keep my leaves with me alway. but they wouldn't be leaves then. i'd be deciduous. they would be needles. the poking kind. the sewing kind. the kind that blanket the floor of the forest, and i'd have to part with them too, but perhaps i'd have an easier time of it because i'd be amongst those whose time has not yet come.

i'd have my pines with plenty to spare and never be unadorned, as it were. without my lovers and friends.

acquaintances are neither here nor there for me.

i have watched many leaves fall of late, the way they twirl through the breeze and light upon the ground there to remain until they are no more.

i wrote a small poem about it, which i won't share, but it said,

these forests of tomorrow

for i understand there can be no perpetuation of trees and forests unless one lets go. unless one watches loved ones cascade away when their time has come to drift gently to the ground and return to dust.

such a time is upon me. such a time is upon me.