It is the evening of Qing Ming… Pure Brightness Festival. People have lit fires along the streets tonight burning fake money to send to their departed loved ones. An old man, a shock of white hair falling across his brow, tends his fire with a stick on a street corner. His face is full of memory and loss, his lips turned down in reflection. I know that look. He is mourning his wife. The white ash floats upward… the fire illuminates his face.

It is also a time of new things. In the fields outside of the city the seeds are sewn into the tidy fields. There will be tender seedlings poking out of the ground soon now that rain will come. Each day I feel just like a seedling, too, poking myself up and out of the warming earth to reach for the sun a little more… each day, that vigor… that suspended moment of youth returning briefly in the spring when the eyes are a blank slate not yet added to by time and experience.

Everything passes in a seasonal rhythm from the long rest of cold half-light and, then, into the next cycle of pure brightness. It reaches its zenith and then fades into bright colors. It is in this cycle we live… we are this cycle. Nothing lasts forever… not happiness… not sadness… not even love… but everything gives itself to us in this cycle of seasons… a circle added each year that broadens our lives just as if we were trees. It is just the way it is.