my eternal green plant

When I was a kid, I used to hear the older folks speak with more than resolution about impending death. For many, it couldn't come quickly enough. Some folks in my church would practically beg to move on. I could never understand it, there on the verge of my experience with all of life ahead, wondering at rumors of wonders I could only vaguely imagine. These people were tired, ready for rest and the next set of wonders. Perhaps they felt exactly as I did - on the verge of experience, life ahead, dim mirror images only vaguely imagined. I was standing in a doorway, looking into a room that they had long since passed through and I could see their doorway, but they could glimpse into the next room.
As I sat and listened to the longing expressed by those old folks, in my incomplete, uninformed state, over time, I was allowed to see a little bit of what they were experiencing. Weary, encumbered, inhibited. As I’ve grown, I’ve actually felt weary, encumbered, inhibited, weighted. I too, have developed a growing longing.

Of course the sparse early signals of Spring have me thinking of these things. Those white blossoms on scattered bushes around town, the twin tulip trees, today’s tiny purple blossoms nearly hidden in the brown, brittle grass.
Seasons are symbols of death and rebirth and living and waiting. We speak of winter as death, spring as rebirth, or resurrection, the summer, the long hot toiling, productive years. Autumn is that beautiful, colorful period of old age- that glorious restful, contented time of fulfillment in the waning years.
This is certainly a beautiful picture of life as each segment of time seems to be a microcosm of life itself. Months were once measured and marked by the birth of the new moon who after a few days of darkness emerges as a sliver and waxes to full glory at middle age before waning and returning to darkness to be reborn. The cycle of life of the moon is my favorite microsm picture of the vapor we call life, for like the Phoenix, the moon must surrender, and die to be reborn. But there are others. Each week closes with the restful exhalation of the weekend and begins anew with the excited new resurrection day. Each day is born with a glorious dawn - darkness overcome with new mercies. The day plays itself out through long, toiling, vain hours and the sun sets. We lay ourselves down to peaceful rest- a reward for perseverance more than productivity and contribution. We awake to start again. We breathe in and are born. We breathe out and die.
Over and over, on and on, we live in tiny, nested microcosms of larger versions of themselves. All around us, the cycle is played out. Birth, life, death. We inhale, we exhale. All there to create a longing for something completely different. Something we've imagined, perhaps even glimpsed, maybe even touched or tasted in the long afternoon or summer, or full moon - before death came and we were made to be reborn yet again.
I’ve symbolized this longing in many ways – a symbolic washing, death and rebirth, an engraved Phoenix on my shoulder blade. But there is so much more in me and of me that still needs to die. Oh that I could kill it all soon enough to watch the new blossoms burst with Spring ’05. I long for the death of cycles and symbols and mirror images. A glimpse of consistency and constancy. An eternal green plant. A flower that does not fade. A condensation of life that does not evaporate.
What blossoms will emerge tomorrow, never to wither and fall?