Steam rises from my coffee, a thin thread lifting into the air, then disappearing.
The sun climbs through the pines on the ridge. Light drifts across the leaf-strewn lawn, moves through the bare undergrowth, and enters my kitchen. It settles on the table where I sit, warming my face and these still hands.
In this valley, sunrise travels far along the horizon as the seasons turn. In summer, it breaks through the oak leaves at six, flooding the rooms with gold. Now it arrives near eight, lower and softer, threading between pine trunks to find me.
Five hours of daylight have slipped away since midsummer. Greens have faded to brown and gray. Even the light feels changed—thinner, more tender, as if carrying the season’s breath within it.
The deer feel the shift. Their stomachs turn with the seasons. As spring’s soft shoots became summer’s tougher leaves, they adjusted to digest more fiber. As the last leaves fell, they changed again to eat twigs and bark—food shaped for the cold months ahead. Now, a sweet apple welcomed when the canopy was full is now a poison their winter bodies cannot bear.
I watch a small doe strip a dry wineberry cane outside the window. She moves slowly, deliberately, gathering what she can. When the branches are bare and snow settles over the valley, some will starve. Others will live on the quiet fire of stored fat until spring returns.
What can be endured is endured.
When it cannot, we fall.
There is nothing to fear.
The leaf drifts down.
The starved deer settles into snow.
A man’s breath quiets, then slips into stillness.
All of it held in the vastness from which it rose,
a nearness we can never lose.
Changing shape, taking on light,
returning in forms not always clear at first,
yet through which we endlessly rise—an intimacy so complete
that we rarely notice it,
even as it shines through everything.
2 Responses
Suffering is suffering. A note that biological systems have gone awry. It is not beautiful or revealing. It simply is.
When the ravaged lungs acidify the blood with carbon dioxide and awakens the prehistoric amygdala, centre of fear. That is not a teachable moment. That is a moment when you can’t swallow your saliva because you are so breathless, even while your throat threatens to stick closed from the interminable gasping of dry air.
It is a moment where you contemplate whether to piss yourself so your body has less demands upon it, or holding in urine.
The sky does not open in revelation. You are not cleansed by pain.
And when it is over, the only thing you have learned is that, THAT suffering was not enough to bring the end. You have learned Worse suffering must await.
Dear Friend,
Since you posted anonymously, then complained a minute later that your comment hadn’t appeared (this blog receives so much spam that without moderation the comments section would quickly be overrun with ads for games and penis pills), and then — another minute later — posted again under your own name, I can only assume you are either a troll or carrying a great deal of pain yourself.
In either case, you have my deepest sympathy and compassion.
You are right: suffering is real, and often as terrible as you describe. Schopenhauer, Sartre, and even the Buddha would agree. What’s worse, there are eight billion people on this planet experiencing suffering in one form or another — and we have been doing so for millennia.
But don’t stop there.
Just as suffering exists, so do pleasure, humor, and happiness — each impermanent, fleeting, and just as undeniably real. The view of a city from an airplane and the view from the street are vastly different, yet both are true. The same holds for suffering.
From within it, suffering can feel endless. I know this firsthand, from five years of steady loss to ALS, including the very choking sensation you describe. And yet, from a longer horizon, I can see that suffering, like everything else, is impermanent. I am not alone in it. Others endure far worse. The truth requires both perspectives at once: the immediate and the enduring, the personal and the universal.
Yes, suffering is real. In a constantly changing universe, clinging to what cannot last — our health, our loved ones, and ultimately our lives — inevitably brings pain. And yet life persists. Light persists. The unity of all things flows on, ever changing, ever renewing.
Both are true: the suffering and the wonder.
So when suffering inevitably comes, you can meet it with fear and despair — or let the pain kindle in you a fierce and tender compassion for all beings, and remind you of the indestructible wonder of the whole.
In one direction lies hell. In the other, its opposite.