Sunday had a bittersweet quality to it. For me, at least, and I suspect for a few more, as well…
Lynn Johnson ended her long running comic “For Better or for Worse.” This has been flat out one of my favorite newspaper comic strips. And I say this as a serious fan of newspaper comics.
Originally she planned on this past Saturday and the Sunday epilogue being “it.” The end. But life is a mysterious thing, as perhaps you’ve noted, things change in various directions, and she’s decided to revisit her creation and continue running the old strips interwoven with new ones drawn in the original style to fill out the back story a bit.
I’ll certainly continue to follow this new-old project.
But, here, I find myself more thinking about the passingness of things.
Sometimes it is easier to look into this most essential teaching of our lives when the stakes aren’t quite as high as this fact on the ground of our existence will inevitably present.
A little easier, I suggest, perhaps, when we’re talking about the passing of a comic strip rather than the passing of a person’s life.
And that can be a gift. Because the hard one will come. So, as the Sufis say, we need to learn to die before we die. And here’s a very small death. Heck, one even with a half life to follow. And still. It can be hard…
As the Zen poet Kobayashi Issa wrote on the occasion of his daughter’s death.
The world of dew
is the world of dew,
and yet, and yet –
I often find this poem pared in my heart with that famous “three things” ending to Mary Oliver’s poem In Blackwater Woods.
Poets often speak to the heart of the matter better than anyone else. At least that’s been my observation. And both Issa’s poem on the fact and the lingering and Oliver’s poem on the how to do of it all are among the more important guides for me on my way.
Together they pretty much summarizes the whole passingness thing and how to deal with it…
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Do I hear an amen?
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