It’s tricky getting older,
losing pieces of who I believed I was,
finding quieter, more truthful
and solitary pieces settling into their places.
We all assume forever,
then wake up one morning counting
the years we might have left,
realizing the this life goes far
more quickly than we ever imagined,
So many roles left to play
and so many goodbyes left to say,
and still, I’m waiting patiently
for that next hello,
scripts are strewn, half-scribbled
in my own messy hand,
When you have rituals you don’t need reasons.
The coffee, the walk, the page,
bathing daily in this sacred silence
that holds the day together
when meaning starts slipping away,
There’s a darkness to these times,
But I’m no stranger to first light
What keeps the soul alive?
The work and the fight,
the stubborn refusal to
let that light inside us start to dim,
Yes, all the blank places
on Earth are vanishing,
paved over, built upon, sold by the pixel.
So I keep this story alive inside me,
a garden of my own creation,
I tend to the soil, prune the branches, admire the results
here, the maps still have white spaces
and the compass, it only points
toward awe, wonder, and peace.
I’ll cloister, in seclusion when I must,
driven half-mad like, everyone else, by the noise,
uneasy of the uncertainty
of my place in this novel version of our story.
These pages, these dwindling blank pages,
they remain both my legacy and emancipator.
In this moment, this one, small,
defiant, and beautifully unfinished story,
it is still mine, all mine to pen.
~Eric Vance Walton~
(Gif created by Grok.com)
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