First Snow and Waning Moon

First Snow in Malvern

Yesterday, the first snow of the season hit the Philadelphia area. This morning, it lies heavy on the evergreens and coats the branches of the maples as if something thought to create art. Something new. Meanwhile, the moon has passed through its magical, mad phase of fullness, and is on the wane. One thing begins, another ends, and both do so with regularity. Of course, these are only two of the wheels constantly turning in the universe. The seasons, the phases of the moon, the days and nights, the years, the galaxies, the lives – all turning, all travelling cycle after cycle.

People are like that. Going through phases, choices, passages of life, over and over and on to the next. There’s this theory or philosophy or religious dogma (pick your descriptor) that defines life as a never-ending series of wheels. We jump to, hang on, and cycle through. If, at the end of the turn, we have learned the featured lesson, we jump to the next wheel. If, however, we fail, we must remain for the next turn. It’s a string of over and over agains until we master the lesson. We must learn to progress to the next lesson, the next program, the next life. And it does us no good to abandon the wheel; it will simply keep turning¸ and, one day we will jump unawares and find ourselves on that old wheel again. Only the lesson will have become bigger, longer, uglier, hairier. And, perhaps without the nice parts – like good relationships or pleasant scents or distracting music – once available to make the process more palatable.

So, the world turns, the galaxies rotate, and our lives come full circle with an alarming frequency. Observing this doesn’t seem to matter. We repeat the same bad choices. We ignore the signs that would help us to master the lessons and warn us against the same old pitfalls. We forget all that occurred in the last cycle as if we had more important things to remember. And, we complain that the wheel does not turn fast enough, as if we weren’t the ones always trying to shift into reverse or drag our heels when the ground passed by.

When we do succeed and move on, we are not quite sure how we did it. Or how to replicate the results. Or how to help our loved ones negotiate the same turns. All we know for sure is that the seasons, the world, and we keep turning as regularly as the rising sun. And, perhaps we should view such turnings as not a second chance to fail, but a reasonably long chain of opportunities to become our better selves.