Summer Mana

I do not know how many people fall asleep in their lives, but I do know that there are moments in my own history where I suddenly felt slapped awake by reality, and I wondered how it was that I did not appreciate before what I now could not appreciate except in memory. Whether it was a friend who moved or a toothless grin, a beach house or a favorite bakery in New York, I always labored under the foolish self deceiving perception that these good good things, these would last, these would stay, and even decades would not alter the landscape.

Nothing in reality reinforces this dillusion, yet it persists just the same. Children grow. Friends move. The seasons even though they come again each year, do not echo their prior manifestations, and the beach is never the same two days in a row. Music played live never repeats itself even if it is the same song. Berries picked from the same plant are not uniform in taste, color or size. Every instant of our lives is a moment of variety, at odds with all that came before and will be. Life is change, and not all of it expected, pleasant or easy.

It is only our morals and our relationships that we can fix, by how we choose to act. I can always wear red, but even the same red will fade with the washes, and the color will seem brighter or duller based on current fashions. But one can always choose to hold a truth to be true, regardless of fashion. One can hold that charity towards all will ultimately make a difference in how we experience the whole world. One can choose to love, and allow that choice to dominate all actions that flow, regardless of the other's response. In fact, the way in which we can be like God is to choose to be constant in truth, in charity and in love.

We can also hold that even with all this chaos that defines our breathing in and breathing out, God loves us in all our disorderly messiness, in all our sins and flaws and faults. Knowing that in all the universe, there is this one constant, makes all the discord of everything else, bearable.