When I’m done here I won’t have children, to continue drawing my line. I’ve never really understood the comfort in that, anyway, except some of my stuff would wait a generation or so before ending in a landfill.

We breathe in and out and carry things around feeling important and devastated and small, and then we simply leave, shifting dimensions with our carcasses left behind. Carcasses. Stuff. Anything else?  What stays, at least for a while?  If love stays, where does it go, becoming as it does, conjoined with inexpressible pain? I know of course that it fills me up from the toes. What else?  I ask because that’s what I want my life to be about while I’m here. For all my abstraction and taste for temporary things like print-making and flowers and hugs, I want to center my time around permanence. I think. 

Would collections of impermanent things become permanent over time?  Might they be embedded in the energy that is me so they remain, like navigational coordinates for future travelers?  Art decays while it is here on earth but does the creative act likewise become corrupted, or does it hover, joining with the life-bringers in a great, joyful dance we cannot see? Flowers last only days, dropping petals, browning at the edges. Everything lovely and natural and sweet like a lilac breeze (not those horrid, wide-eyed porcelain figures that bait with the subtlety of dart boards) may somehow collect itself, honey in a jar that we find on the other side. And hugs, well, those are obvious, I suppose.  Physical manifestations of affection, support, love, comfort, must somehow remain, even if they’ve leaked to somewhere we can no longer feel them from here. They carry meaning.  They carry hope. They hold every ounce of anything that ever mattered anywhere. 

I suppose those are still the things that matter to me, then. If I end this life having done nothing but loved, comforted, held, beheld, and generally spent myself on beauty, authenticity and kindness, then I will have left behind the only things that matter. I’ll do other things sometimes, God help me. I believe there is grace for that. It gets burned off as we transition from here to there. So since I have no children I’ll spend all of myself on you and me and the God who made all the good stuff, all this weird interdimensional, grounded reality and spiritual plane shit, as though he knew what he was doing when he put everything into play. Maybe each one of us is actually a note in a grand orchestral song. I think that would be fine with me.