Sanjay Gandhi National Park, Mumbai, India
Slowly and swiftly, I came back to life
Hope convinces you to believe in something better, persuades you the outcome will be favorable, and whispers eagerly in your ear that the miracle you so desperately need will happen.
There’s no such thing as a completely fresh start. Everything new arrives on the heels of something old. Things just begin again in a new way.
A million leaves from a hundred different branches dip in the wind, fluttering with the false promise of flight. The gust catches their withered wings only to force them downward, forgotten, left to be trampled. Yet upon those boughs which shake against the cold, where the leaves turn yellow and orange in the fall, falling by the winter, but returning in the spring like it knows that no winter will last forever no matter how cold.
In autumn, leaves are a little yellow, the tone mellow, the colors richer, and it is tinged a little with sorrow and a premonition of the end of life. Its golden richness speaks not of the innocence of spring or the power of summer but of the mellowness and kindly wisdom of approaching age. It knows the limitations of life and is yet content.
You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees, and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as the river would flow again after it froze.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning all over again with the summer.
Death is not the opposite of life but a part of it.
Do not complain beneath the stars about the lack of bright spots in your life.