Sunday 3 November 2013

a shadow upon a shadow

My dad was 80 this week. EIGHTY. That's almost a hundred, a life that has spanned generations, like the wings of an eagle, stretching across a vast sky and pushing into the sunlight. Long before I was born those generations flew into the shadows of my dad's own family, a fledgling with siblings and parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins and friends, and then after that, the nest expanding, the season's merging, soaring into a new path, a new story emerging, five of us, joining together with my father and mother as a family. And then we created our own, contributing to the generations with our own children who then in turn have come together in their own narratives, each flying beyond the moon and the stars carving their unique little worlds that merge and shine like the silver diamonds they were cut from.

We celebrated my dad's big day as a family; children, grandchildren and great grandchildren coming today in a frenzied burst of energy, sheltering under those broad brushstrokes of life, laughing, eating, chatting, pulling in the past and stretching out towards the future.

The future is so uncertain and yet so is the past. Is it as you thought it was, do the walls shift and merge at different angles as we move forward? If you step backwards the path isn't always where it once was, it changes direction as we grow and learn and become wiser. And the future's there, somewhere in the distance. Are we part of it and if we are what form do we take, what heights have we climbed to. Have we climbed?

The only moment with any certainty is the one that sits on your shoulders, turning with you, a shadow upon a shadow, a window to your soul. Grasp it, hold it tight and fly.

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