Not long ago I was hiking somewhere through the woods. I can’t remember where it was, but
An image from that walk keeps coming back to me. It was a nice moment, but it haunts me like a friendly ghost. I saw a thick, dead branch. It was one of those old branches, where the bark has all gone and the dead, dry wood has turned silver from sitting in the sun — Like a bone, or driftwood. What caught my attention was how green moss had crept up the wood, like new skin. The green went from deep emerald in moist shadow, to the light tone of a baby frog’s back, glistening in light.
The gradient of the green on the wood was such a gentle progression that it astounded me. Plants do that, don’t they? They mix the living and the dead, without being horrifying in a way that animals can never do. The life that lives on in our decay is too squirmy, and repulsive. Gangrene is grotesque, but moss is a comfort.
In the ‘90s, on a visit to London, I explored a run-down cemetery. That was my first encounter with the capacity for moss to provoke existential musings. The green of gravestones, names worn off by time, silently signaled the deep, slow fact of life creeping over the dead like a blanket. It’s easy for a morbid man like myself to see death everywhere, especially in a cemetery, but closer to the truth is that everywhere I look I see life. Beautiful life. And the life within me, underneath the relentless chatter of my mind, of loves that life. It loves it in the sparkle of another human’s eyes, in the bark of a dog, the song of a bird, the croak of a frog, the chirp of a cricket, the green of the moss, even the squirm of the worm. It’s only my mind that lingers on death, even as my heart beats to the rhythm of life all around me.
That’s my Free Life Coach to you this Thanksgiving week. Even if life feels founded on death, like a granite gravestone, or a bone-dry branch, let your gaze linger on the gradations that creep across its surface. They run deep, friend, within us and without. The inaudible hum of existence never stops. Be silent, be still. Listen long, look hard, until you know yourself to be nothing more, and nothing less, both finite and endless, like a smear of green across a stone, growing, creeping, living.
Thanksgiving is coming. The obvious Free Life Coach advice this week would be to cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Everybody knows that focusing on what you’re grateful for makes you feel better. I’m grateful for the moments you took to read these words.
Be grateful, friends, while I remain,
Your Free Life Coach,
Sean Sakamoto
Lovely <3