What Ends Can Be Embraced

That part of my life is over now...teaching for the last 18 years at a community college is beginning to come to the end days. Running a theatre department that I revived from nothing. Now a new energy is in place to take over. My energy is facing elsewhere: filmmaking, acting, writing. The hardest part is relinquishing the control and saying good bye to my child...that particular theatre...and strangely my friend Carla is dying, really dying from ALS and she and I were the jumpstarters of the program for the first year...she's leaving the earthly plane forever...and this house, my home, clearing it out, giving things away...knowing my time here is also coming to an end...my little beloved companion dog Louie, how much longer will those mitral valves hold out? He was supposed to have died 2.5 years ago and he is 13 years old and my little Honey...blind now, losing her hearing at 15 years old, how much longer? And the ancient cat Lily who sleeps all day and is 18 years old, how much longer for Lily as well? And my mother turning 89 on March 19th and knowing full well every single day may be the last...all these endings. But I am not sad. I am grateful. I can feel the preciousness of every single moment in a way I could never before. I know it's fragility and its impermanence and its rare decaying beauty. I embrace the change because it is reality and reality is the best and truest high there is....this moment...my god I have this moment by moment by....forever, don't I?