The Whole of It

Because we are creatures made of time, what we call suffering is at bottom a warping of time, a form of living against it and not with it — the pain of loss, aching for what has been and no longer is; the pain of longing, aching for what could be but is not yet and may never be; the pain of loneliness, an endless now hollowed of meaning. There can be consolation in looking backward to fathom the staggering odds of never having been born, and in looking forward toward the immortal generosity of our atoms. But nothing calibrates our losses of perspective, nothing consecrates these transient lives bookended by not yet and never again, more than broadening our time horizon until the vista of our own lives becomes not a discrete point but part of a great continuity — one that comes alive in this splendid poem by Hannah Fries:

THE WHOLE OF IT
by Hannah Fries

If you step back, you can see it all
on the horizon: your mother’s death, the children
grown, their smooth eyelids crossed with veins
like saffron filaments. Further still, and see
your smiling grandmother treading the cold ocean,
tiny lakes in her collarbones, your great-
great grandchildren drawing their names
in the sand with sticks. The seas
rising and falling, ice scraping the earth,
and pockets of life surviving — lee sides, hot springs,
protected places. First light on the first day
of your life, and first light of first stars.
And in this way, every death, each apparent ending,
might, in the mind of spacetime, be woven
into one memory, so that always is
this tree, and the long days of falling in love
over the intricate pattern of bark and leaf,
and the first green cell learning to swallow sun.

Couple with Hannah’s magnificent poem “Let the Last Thing Be Song,” then revisit Kahlil Gibran on befriending time.

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