ending

1. Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand
2. I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect
3. Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep
4. Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts
5. The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved
6. Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide
7. I Love To Be Alone
8. A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows
9. Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House
10. The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed
11. After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying
12. The Sun Is But A Morning Star
13. A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing
14. As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending
15. A Sullen Rush And Roar

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

One summer morning, the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend, and in it she’d written that she wanted to break up with me. I’ve always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I’m sure that from here on I’ll continue to…et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new boyfriend.

I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside and drank a can of beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took three HB pencils I had on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn’t that I was angry, really. I just didn’t know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was commenting on my suddenly “outgoing disposition”. What is it about life?

And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind.

Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves.

At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language.

This is the final lesson of the timeless way.

If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me.

You say the ocean’s rising like I give a shit
You say the whole world’s ending, honey, it already did
You’re not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried
Got it? Good, now get inside

At the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave.

That unapparent summer air in early fall
The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all
There it is again
That funny feeling

And if you can get anywhere from anywhere,
You can start anywhere
And end anywhere.
There is no single necessary order.

“We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…”