cthewind's Blog

“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end,” Seneca.

Today is Commencement at my institution—an ending that is also a beginning, as the word suggests. It’s not the beginning of life or the “real world,” as some style it, but the beginning that starts again when it seemed like everything was over, like there was a stopping place.

It’s good news and bad news all at once, but there is no stopping place. It’s all practice, endings and beginnings—ending before you wanted to or after you should have quit, beginning when you think you cannot or after you did not.

This life is hard to take in; it can make your chest burst with the thoughts and feelings of it all. That’s why we need ceremonies and poetry—expansive spaces opened for a time that help us hold it and feel it.

…for one who is burned out

This is the end—an end of something

It’s just not the end of you

May you love the charred landscape of your effort and the futile embers of your energy

You can traverse this terrain, but only tenderly, as though leaving footsteps in the moon that will never be erased

Better to lament and grieve the self you spent here

That self is at an end.

Pronounce a eulogy, if you can—some good words to honor your effort, along with some commitment, vague for now, to live differently because of the memory

You’re not ready to receive this or take it in, yet hear it anyway: new things grow where burns have been.

Ashes are not the fertilizer you had in mind, and minute bits of green, suddenly present today when there was neither sign nor promise yesterday, are not the lush dense foliage you think you need to nourish and shelter you

So let this blessing be enough—an honoring of your effort and a real end

Endings always yield to beginnings

And you will, too

ways that are beautiful

Come, traveler,

Let us walk in ways that are beautiful

that lead to peace because they are trod in peace

We’ll catch glimpses of ways already made

At times, way-finders, and in others, way-makers

All it will cost is your attention

And that’s everything