"Endless Cycle Of Creation, Crisis, Collapse And Rebirth"
by Hardscrabble Farmer
"A few years back the pigs were turning up the soil behind the house and uncovered an old worn down iron ax head. There wasn’t more than an inch of the bit left forward of the hole. I keep it around to remind me of how something that you imagine is impervious to wear- after all the ax chops the wood- can be worn down by time and the much less robust wood it repeatedly worked.
To think of how valuable a pioneer ax was to someone carving out a homestead in the midst of an impenetrable forest that they would use it up before discarding it, to imagine how many times it must have struck to have given up four inches of hardened steel to the task puts our own lives in perspective.
We are used up by life, and yet we roll out of bed every morning and get back at it whatever it is we do only to vanish at the end with all that work left undone and even more that has never been taken up.
God or Nature uses us like that ax to prepare a living space for all of Creation. We are the raw ore, cleansed in the crucible of our birth, fashioned in the forge of life itself, shaped by the anvil of our family, used to the point of failure by time only to be returned to the earth from which we- like the ax- once came.
This is an endless cycle of creation, crisis, collapse and rebirth. It will only end when the last of our species is gone and all that any of us can do, all that we are capable of is to be as utile in our own time as we can be, to fulfill whatever role our shape was destined to do in its time.
Be a good ax and keep cutting until your bit is worn away."
Hat tip to The Burning Platform.
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"Hours and days and months and years go by; the past
returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know;
but whatever the time gives us in which we live,
we should therefore be content."
- Cicero, “On Old Age”
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"Death twitches my ear. 'Live,' he says, 'I am coming.'"
~ Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro)
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