I pause and witness a day’s labor:
dead branches piled on the ground,
pruned lilacs in the grove
of unattended neglect,
young shoots now allowed to grow
and provide the scent of spring
when they mature into bloom.
It is easier to see another’s aging
rather than my own—
when a tree or a flower
completes its purpose,
ceases to be its full self, without fear,
it returns to the earth, restored
to the wholeness of creation.
While my aging manifests in human form,
the Self that resides within does not grow old—
itself an everlasting fractal of the whole.
When I no longer bloom, when
my mission is complete,
the Self is absorbed into All That Is.
A new cycle begins.
“Modern humans became fixated on a collective hallucination of linear time, ignoring the fractal spirals of the surrounding universe.”
-Daniel Pinchbeck
“A fractal is a way of seeing infinity.”
-Benoit Mandelbrot
“Any issue and any problem, no matter what height you look at it from, no matter how much you extend past the first fractal, it’s still a fractal of something that emanates from within your consciousness – from within the human consciousness. And it’ll move on and manifest itself externally, and then those are what we pick up as societal ills. But all these battles we’re fighting are internal. For me, it’s reconciling hope with dread and trying to cut out some place in my mind where my heart can be protected a little bit.”
-EI-P
