The things that stay

One thing I've really come to believe is that we are not all separate souls living in separate bodies. I feel very strongly--I have seen evidence of it in so many ways--that we are one soul, like a giant piece of cloth, and our bodies just latch on to it, here and there wherever they are meant to, assisting the soul in doing and experiencing whatever it is meant to do-- both giving it shape and allowing it to navigate around and through itself, so it can connect and interact with other pieces of itself. Communicating, learning, creating, loving, conflicting. Flux and flow. There is not really any you or I, nor us and them. Just a giant oneness. An entity which creates and destroys, loves and hates itself infinitely.

I think of our bodies as clothespins, which, left out in the elements, eventually rot and fall off, but the cloth they were clamped on and the line beneath it remains, and always will. MOre pins come as others fall off, on and on into eternity. There is no beginning or ending to any of us, ether in space or in time.
I thought of this as I hung out my laundry one day recently. I found a piece of laundry that had been left on the line over the winter. I thought about going out to get it when i realized it was out there, but it was just an old towel, and I wanted to see what the elements would do to it. It beached on the upper side to near white, and kept most of it's color underneath. Interestingly, all of the clothespins rotted and fell off, and there was only one rusty metal spring still left on the line. The poetic part of the whole thing was this: the clothes pins were gone, and yet the towel still hung there after the wind and snow, freezing and thawing of a whole winter. It had begun to unravel as it whipped about in the wind, and the fibers turned to fringe. In time, the fringe wrapped around the clothesline and held on, even when the clothes pins did not. It formed a defiant little fist, and that's all that held it there.