Crumbling

All it takes is a little look around, and I see what I don’t want to see. My world is crumbling. It is going the way of the dinosaur, becoming the scene I once was thrilled being within, the family that once bore me, the life I once lived. It is all moving on, passing so quickly, going into the inscrutable silence. I am overwhelmed, sensitized and dumbfounded. Living now is an affair of loss. Everything is crumbling.

There was a time when I merely complained about this. It seemed some anomaly, a lose edge designed to awaken me, and return me to a former life refreshed by a bigger perspective. But now, I cannot deny the impermanent nature of all things. This, as a friend says, is a bittersweet realization. It frees me as it reduces me. The crumbling is me.

I can rhapsodize about death. The great poets and holy men have made of it a kind of healing justice, but none have taken away the heartache. Hot tears may wash me clean for awhile, but the steady corrosion of loss, eats away all the cleanliness. I am the wicked witch of the west shrinking into nothingnesss. I am the mystery that is here and gone. I am an illusion I had for a while. Crumbling is.

There is relief in knowing nothing is permanent. I relish the demise of what I cannot abide. But then, I don’t let myself know what inevitably follows. Into whatever, the mysterious disappearance, the many after-life assumptions, the mad refrains of freedom and peace, do not appease the uncertain ache of the crumbling. I am amazed, delirious, sobered and incredulous. The crumbling goes on unabated.

Is it delirium; a form of intimacy, a desperate admission, a death bed confession, a wise resignation, an admission of vulnerability, to say that the crumbling is a brilliant and highly anxiety-producing aspect of my experience? Do I love more, or shrink more, because of it? I don’t know. The crumbling goes on anyway.

There isn’t a lot to write about, when everything passes. No words could ever capture the completeness of extinction. Although I’m capable as a human of knowing of this fate, I’m not really capable of fully appreciating it. Stillness does not reverberate with meaning. Silence is not a home. Even if I am better, or worse, because I recognize the crumbling, I cannot hold those ways of being long. It all comes to pass.

Crumbling seems to be my birthright. It is a more faithful companion than any I might have thought I knew. There is only a brief moment of astonishment and grief, then it all crumbles.

I am bereft, feeling the loss, in my friends losing loved ones, in my own losses, in the steady drumbeat of grief around me, in the passing of formative events. Crumbling seems to highlight to me what is briefly important, before it too passes beyond my reach. I don’t know if it is a curse or a blessing, perhaps its both, but I know for sure, it brings my wonder up to a resonating, one could say quivering, uncertainty. Crumbling gets me.