Over the last year, too many people have disappeared from my life:
The best man at my wedding and all my major life events.
My best friend from grade school
My racquetball partner and good friend
My sister less than a month ago
And my brother is staring at the edges of his existence. I’m hoping he is around as long as possible, but his condition has him grateful for waking each day in a way that we don’t understand until it is in front of us.
It is that time of life when these things begin to happen. The lessons are clear.
It is time to get comfortable with the idea of my own disappearance,
Stay open, learn, and grow every moment I have.
It is time to become a better improviser, teach more classes
Listen to more people and smile at how beautiful they are
Spend more time with the trees and the seas,
Hold more hands. Make more love.
Write whenever there is something to say.
Accept the constancy of change and the reality of fading away.
Out on the deck, overlooking the southern end of the Salish Sea
There is a spiral piece of clear acrylic that twists in the wind
It catches the colors from the sun and dances in the light
It comes from the home of my best man and friend, John
And every time I see it, I think of him.
It is beautiful, impractical, and unique, just like he was,
And even though I can no longer visit him,
because he has disappeared from this plane.
He visits me all of the time.
Over the last year, too many people have disappeared from my life
But they are never really gone.
They haunt my dreams in the best of all possible ways
They feed me through my tears
And continue to enrich the breathing life I still have
All essential parts of the interbeing
that never ends or disappears
In this dynamic time of life
spinning on a string and dancing in the light.
— DanielSouthGate
The best man at my wedding and all my major life events.
My best friend from grade school
My racquetball partner and good friend
My sister less than a month ago
And my brother is staring at the edges of his existence. I’m hoping he is around as long as possible, but his condition has him grateful for waking each day in a way that we don’t understand until it is in front of us.
It is that time of life when these things begin to happen. The lessons are clear.
It is time to get comfortable with the idea of my own disappearance,
Stay open, learn, and grow every moment I have.
It is time to become a better improviser, teach more classes
Listen to more people and smile at how beautiful they are
Spend more time with the trees and the seas,
Hold more hands. Make more love.
Write whenever there is something to say.
Accept the constancy of change and the reality of fading away.
Out on the deck, overlooking the southern end of the Salish Sea
There is a spiral piece of clear acrylic that twists in the wind
It catches the colors from the sun and dances in the light
It comes from the home of my best man and friend, John
And every time I see it, I think of him.
It is beautiful, impractical, and unique, just like he was,
And even though I can no longer visit him,
because he has disappeared from this plane.
He visits me all of the time.
Over the last year, too many people have disappeared from my life
But they are never really gone.
They haunt my dreams in the best of all possible ways
They feed me through my tears
And continue to enrich the breathing life I still have
All essential parts of the interbeing
that never ends or disappears
In this dynamic time of life
spinning on a string and dancing in the light.
— DanielSouthGate
Really nice piece. I appreciate it so much. I think about my "disappearance" a lot these days, and at the same time, I've never been more productive in certain ways. I'll just say those ways are not athletics or housecleaning! Not being here... what will that be like? (Macoff)
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