Leaf As Life
by Odin Roark

The leaf in springtime
chooses to reveal its initial Yin and Yang shape,
its bud to green, green to golden,
gold to brown,
its cycle in perpetuity.

The inner-self of man
struggles to accept this phenomenon of life
as part of a universal nature,
its mind instead choosing separateness,
creating its own sentient alienation.

To embrace the oneness of both leaf and man,
is to know the presence of any one phenomenon
makes possible the existence of all other phenomena,
and such manifestation,
appearance and disappearance,
is to the cosmic convergence dissolving into itself,
one in all,
all in one.

How liberating
this acceptance of all things
empty of a separate, isolated self,
enjoining instead the principal of interdependence
with the non-self as the quintessential singularity of one.

And then…

To look up at a cloud drifting across the sky,
the formation of a white background to the leaf,
be it green, golden or transformative brown,
is to know how imminently patient
one’s own cold front frames aging with time,
readying the immutable transformation of cloud into rain,
a weathered becoming of its other self,
droplets singing joyfully in their descent to nourish another being,
another leaf
another life.