This is the End

It’s late fall, and a brisk morning for a walk. I shiver inside my jacket as the icy wind cuts through and chills me to the bone. I chuckle at the thought of my suffering until suddenly I am acutely and terrifyingly aware of the world around me. What terrible scenes I discover as I nervously examine this newly seen and immensely bleak world. As the wintery breeze slithers by, the grasses whisper their final words of gossip; the leaves hiss and writhe as they are ripped from their lofty homes only to come to rest in gutters and drains. The trees are shrieking and shuttering as they lose their Technicolor quilts and turn a cold, lifeless grey. Even the air is beginning to bite and sting, angry at its loss of company. Helpless and hopeless, I lie down in the grass, as if I mean to die alongside it.  It’s cold and damp as it brushes my skin, caressing me with clammy hands of death. I fall into a sharp downward spiral of loneliness and longing for life and an end to this suffering. I think to myself, “what beauty is there in this?” “Where is the joy in all of this death and agony?”

 

Then it hits me. These things around me, no matter how bleak the season becomes, all return to life when this pain is over. If this is true, then this is not so much death, as a lengthy sleep. Some say that to sleep is to die, but if this is the case, then to wake must be to come into existence again. For all the times we die, for all the days we spend in death, we spend the same in life. To think that each night my life ends, the life I lived previously is left behind and when I wake I am born again to live again, a fresh, new life. I realize now that I have been lying in an empty field for some time, contemplating this life; when my eyes focus again on the world around me, there is no more suffering. No more shrieking trees or hissing leaves, no more biting winds or gossiping grasses. No. There is only hope. There is only the anxious anticipation of the coming season, of the awakening; of the coming life.