Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf

In my beginning is my end. In succession
Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,
Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place
Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass.
Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,
Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth
Which is already flesh, fur, and faeces,
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
Houses live and die: there is a time for building
And a time for living and for generation
And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane
And to shake the wainscot where the field mouse trots
And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.
--Opening lines of “East Coker” from The Four Quartets of T.S. Eliot.

Portland, boom-city, is a place where neighborhoods are being gentrified and the past is being erased, old stone to new building, ashes to earth. Today we have a heat-wave, 100F/38C and Sue and I set out for a walk in the early morning before the heat came down. This is the Lone Fir Cemetery near Sue’s house, a place we often walk. If you look closely left of center and high up in the trees, and higher still very near the center of the photograph, you’ll see some beautiful disc-shaped spider webs with glistening strands drifting down and right. Closer image of the spider web in the extra.

I have often quoted The Four Quartets. I find it a marvelous compendium of much that arises in my life. I think I would have found T.S. Eliot insufferable, had I known him, and he would have wasted no time on me. But something came through him, some wisdom distilled from all his study and anguish, and from the anguish he caused others. He gave words to truth that resonates in my heart-mind. Here he is in my journal again, chanting about impermanence.