another year without any heaven: why I hate spring
I wrote this years ago... back in 2001. But I still feel the same way Something about this time of year:
For some reason for the past few days I have been thinking of the idea of heaven. I've dreamed of a distant parade of people and beasts (most especially the dogs and the lions all with garlands of pale flowers about their necks) and the people rejoined, reunited at last with each other in soft robes and holding hands. They are singing (even the dogs) and they sound so sweet and in harmony with each other that you know from the sound of their song that no one is alone or searching for anything. No one is wanting or striving, yet they are moving, like the elegant runners I have seen who seem to make their flight over the earth so effortlessly and whose strides fall in unison somehow, unconscious, I think. There is no end. It is infinite.
I was sitting on the train this morning and listening to some music and I found myself crying because the thought of this impossible parade had entered in to my mind again and I wished that in the distance I could be assured that all of the lost people: the innocent, the confused, the hated (and the animals too, who are to dumb to ever know their place in the world, yet still seem to know love, like my small hound dog, Bobick) I wished that they were really there and that they could sing at last and that the truth (the truth is that life grows dark when it ends and is snuffed out in a gasp of fear-- leaving nothing behind but flesh to rot and memories to plague the living) -- I wished that that awful truth were not so.
But, I know better.
Well, here is spring for me. My window can stay open all night again. Each year, along with the earth, windows crack and tear open, like these new flowers breaking open old memories and they tear and stab in to me harder and harder as each season passes.
Someday every moment of this season will be an anniversary of loss. Another warm summer that my silly old dog will never see, another year without any heaven.