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| Time. |
The sun warms the stone, and the bench beckons passersby,
but no one stops to visit. There is too
much to do in the bustling world and never enough time to sit and watch the
river. The summer will continue on with
the stone becoming very hot in the blazing sun and radiating its warmth to the secret
night creatures when the King has turned his head, only to continue the cycle
the following day. It is the stone bench
alone that witnesses the sacred coming of both the day and the night. The surrounding creatures are relegated to
one or the other.
Eventually, the leaves will fall, as they always have, and
the world around the stone bench will burst into dramatic colors of goodbye and
celebrations of death. The river will
grow stormy and turbulent, thrashing about with its axe. The bench will grow cooler and then cold and
then very cold as the snow flies and the ice—the ever increasing ice—builds again,
threatening to swallow the entire world as it smashes along the land. Yet still the bench beckons. The passersby, but few in number now, will
tighten their collars and hurry by, poignantly aware of the death around them.
And then spring will come again, as it always has, with
life returning and the stone bench still there, jutting out from the receding
ice. Waiting and inanimate, watching the
movement all around it as the Earth hurries to continue her cycles of life and
death, of being and unbeing. The bench
is lonely although not bereft because it has the one thing none of the others
possess but for which they continually search in vain: It has time.
It has always had time. Perhaps next year will be different. Perhaps not.
