Roshi
There is no time. There is no time, anymore – to mellow with age, to accumulate experience like merit badges, to wait for life to transmute into wisdom. We who remain must leap into life, as though it were the net beside our burning building. I say rush now toward wisdom. Because there is no time to study cause and effect. No time for blind testing of the spirit. Wisdom must be found and grasped still hot in the flesh, still flashing in the eyes of those we meet, and love and make love with. So, lover, come closer that we may give to each other what fate conspires to deny us. Whisper your wisdom to my tongue. Burn your visions into my memory. Inscribe your experience across my flesh. Because we cannot depend on time to deliver us elderly and wise to death’s embrace. Better to ask now for a wooden rocking chair on a shady country porch and the right to die as wise men will, patiently, with understanding. Old age for us must be whatever age we live to see. 06/13-08/03/98 fields landing, ca m.j.arcangelini (Roshi is a Japanese word meaning “old master or wise master.” It is not commonly used, but is associated with Buddhist practice. This same word, when written with Chinese characters, may be understood as meaning “death from old age.”
