Heavy snow falling
silently
birds chirp all around
The words “embracing entropy” come to me from a recent conversation with a friend at the Co-op and remind me of another conversation long ago about architecture. With everything we build we engage in entropy, and each structure begins to decompose even as we dream it up. I now grasp entropy, the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe, the sense of disintegration, the melting of the winter snows into muddy earth, as I sense my aging body, see the grey hair, and hear the voice out of time with my city.
This is a time when Japanese women of yore retreated to hermitages, to nunneries, to live out their lives in art, poetry, and meditation. Not a bad thing to consider… a retreat from the vagaries of the world, a place to invest my existence, my knowledge… but before long I’d be building a sauna or tea house!
How shall I move from active participant in the ways of the world, to an in-between-time, a time of limbo between life and death? We are told that we live in a constantly changing world, but I see it rather as some sort an infernal stasis of reoccurring human machinations.
If we are projections from that eternal immensity we cannot name and cannot describe, so are we complete with a life force (however temporary) that animates us and engages us in the physical realm. We are the beauty and drama of life that sees itself unfolding before our own eyes. We are at a time of dissolution that we do not understand… despite having a millennia of intimate Knowledge. The entropy that we know is only the chaos and disorder we feel at the dissolving of our physical and emotional and mental attachments. We must turn the wheel of the universe toward a deepening awareness. The ultimate embracing of entropy is our return to the Source, to the uncovering our own True Nature.
