What a bleak and dreary morning.
Once there was a time when I could hear the sound of birds singing and feel the warmth of the sun washing over this room. Today, though, there is only cold and dark and bittersweet memories of days long passed.
For all the pleasure - and pain - they bring, it is too bad that memories aren't more useful; memories can be beautiful or discomforting; full of joy or overwhelming sorrow . They are as fragile as an angel's gossamer wings and as fleeting as a falling star streaking across a clear midnight sky. Memories can be as whimsical and as useless as a shadow dancing on a placid, twilight bay and as necessary as the air we breathe. Memories are ethereal enigmas - we know they are there but they are as intangible as a distant rainbow.
Memories are the only link we have to what we used to be. Memories make us who we are. We are the sum total of our memories. Without them we would not be who were are. Indeed, memories are the bridges to yesterday; they are the only way we have to go back across the never ending river of time.
These fragile wisps of memory are not accurate glimpses of our pasts, they are surrealistic watercolors painted by the crafty hand of our subconscious minds; they may look far better than they really are. Memories, like old paintings, become faded with time. The happy times seem happier and the sad times seem sadder - and nothing we remember is quite the way it really was.
But, how can we measure such ethereal things? How can we measure the accuracy of our own memories? No one knows our thoughts and memories better than we know our own. I'm sure nothing I remember is the way it really was. Yet memories are all we have; memories are all we are.
Even though memories may be fleeting, distorted glimpses of the past, they are the only links we have between what we are and what we used to be; between what we were and what we may be tomorrow.
Memories are all we will have left when everything else is gone. Sometimes, by the end of our lives, even our memories are taken from us leaving us without a friend - even our own "selves" have left us. To be old and alone without a single memory is the saddest place we can ever be.
On this strange and cold winter morning, memories of spring float quietly through my mind. The memories I have of spring bring both hope. for the spring to come, and a yearning for watercolor springs I knew as a boy, when I stood among the blooming things, my hands pulling at the strings of dancing kites.
I'm not sure how I should feel this morning, but I am glad that I have so many memories. They are the bridges to yesterday.
Tags: Reflection Meditation Spring Memories
