More than half a year out from graduate school, and I still find myself in something of a transitional phase. I'm living in a smallish house way out in the woods for the time being and am teaching classes at the local community college for a less-than-stellar wage.
The place where I live, I know, has seen many different lives as well. Not too far from me, there stand a few stones from an old mill, long since disused. In more recent history, this place was once a growing lake town, with new builders and buyers coming in, looking for a happy retirement. The lake is long since dried up now, with only the occasional stream passing through its old lakebed, which reminds me that there was once an abundance of water here. I try to be grateful to this water in the same way I am grateful to the tall grasses and new trees that have grown up where the lakebed was. These things could never exist beneath the surface of a lake.
So in this way life ends, begins again, and perhaps ends again, just to wait for another round. I won't be here forever, in both the long and short sense of the phrase. My life must and will move on from how it is now, and this place will move with it, becoming incomparable to the dry place I know today. There is beauty in this, just as there is beauty in the present moment. I breathe in, I cherish these things, I try to live well at every step. I encourage you to do the same: Take care of what you find.
The place where I live, I know, has seen many different lives as well. Not too far from me, there stand a few stones from an old mill, long since disused. In more recent history, this place was once a growing lake town, with new builders and buyers coming in, looking for a happy retirement. The lake is long since dried up now, with only the occasional stream passing through its old lakebed, which reminds me that there was once an abundance of water here. I try to be grateful to this water in the same way I am grateful to the tall grasses and new trees that have grown up where the lakebed was. These things could never exist beneath the surface of a lake.
So in this way life ends, begins again, and perhaps ends again, just to wait for another round. I won't be here forever, in both the long and short sense of the phrase. My life must and will move on from how it is now, and this place will move with it, becoming incomparable to the dry place I know today. There is beauty in this, just as there is beauty in the present moment. I breathe in, I cherish these things, I try to live well at every step. I encourage you to do the same: Take care of what you find.
Depictions of sumo wrestlers, otherwise known as rikishi (Kuniyoshi, Kunisada, Ay-O).