Beneath a complex sky all shields fall. We look Time in the face, it stares us down, any He and She of it blowing through us a wind of love and memory and what can never be reversed. As the family gathers decreasing its distances our reflections seen of one another converge, one single point given by the one who has brought us here. In its invisible distance how the point spreads its force! With love flowing through our appearances its source has frozen seeming to have cut us off... ... we are left floating in the center of the mind’s horizon faced only with ourselves, inevitably. Carrying the casket I carry myself within a ceremony removed from time. As it lowers into the earth I sense it as where I will belong, hearing the dirt hit the wood from the acoustics within the coffin, watching the total darkness gather around my body mutely into the all-padded silence of my end. A connectedness taking me outside myself, light and darkness of communion. Past has more meaning than words, these eternal moments... If we speak, let the words fall as prayer, leaving the living, loving bodies. December 2, 2004