Bridges

The flow of one year into the next somehow feels more momentous than the simple passage of one moment to another. We stand at the foot of a bridge anchored in the ruins of the past and taking our leave of what was once and is no more, stumble into the soft unformed future, burdened needlessly with resolutions that fill a persistent suspicion of brokenness, as if we could use this mud to fill the cracks through which only light flows.  As if we were not loved in our various states of abandon! For this is an enigmatic journey, this moment to moment passage, in which we must shed the illusion of foreign destinations in order to inhabit the illumined Now, eternal in its fluid nature. A journey whose sole purpose would have us understand that we never left.

Thoreau in his essay "Where I lived, and What I Lived For," describes this moment:

Time is but the stream I go fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. It's thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born.

In truth there is only one bridge to cross and that is the one that leads from ignorance to the joyous recognition of our own devine nature. The miraculous happens and we find ourselves standing refreshed on the sandy bottom of eternity, full of childlike wisdom and content to rest in the slipstream of time.