One of the obituaries for the American poet William Merwin, who passed away last month, described him as one who decried what he called this "damnable evanescence."  Like many of us, Merwin was frustrated by the limits of our very brief existence on this planet.
    At the same time, again, like many of us, Derwin was fascinated, in the truest sense of the ancient word from which it comes, by the transience of this existence, intrigued by its "awfulness" as well as its "awefulness."  Our life fuels and empowers us, and our life drags us down:  why must it end?

     In his "Wild Geese," Merwin writes, "The gibbons call from the mountain gorges the old words all deepen the great absence the vastness of all that has been lost it is still there when the poet in exile looks up long ago hearing the voices of wild geese far above him flying home."
     Although we could unpack this for many hours, suffice it to say that, like Caspar Friedrich's "Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog," we daily stand on the precipice of mystery, the mystery of what has been, the even greater mystery of what will come.
     Moreover, that it all happens.  And we can do nothing about it.  Except live and, if we are wise, believe that it is for more than itself.