Sunlight and Dead Cardinals

I'm going to prattle around the dunes and pines and muck fields forever. The territory trades names and so do farmers. But it is always me who arrives, admiring moony sunsets and breezes thick with onion air and springtime blackbird calls.

I don't understand how this is. There is a "me" experiencing sunlight and dead cardinals and dog kisses and family card games. She feels a world groaning, suffering under the weight of humanity. Yet she also grounds into the earth welcoming the silence of nothing. The motionless motion lifting into every molecule that ever existed. Free. Undone. Not me.

These teachers I know say that is it. This is it. I listen so hard and at times, the clarity is devastating. Though mostly, I hear my own voice schlepping through daily ethos: this, here, now, the end.

And yet. She wrestles with a psychic twinge curbing the belief in disbelief.

From my seat at the rounded dining room table, I face the painting of a field of red poppies that his grandmother, who became my grandmother, stared into every day. A window to nowhere.

How do I let this be?