IT WOULDN'T ALL BE GONE

i was out on the south deck just now doing my first morning stretches, looking around at the grass, sky, mountains, sea, the cap cloud resting lightly on mount baker in the morning sun, trying to imagine it all gone, everything, the result of my mortality. 

i realized i was smiling, quite benignly. of course it wouldn't all be gone. why should mount baker disappear just because i can't see it anymore? why should the grass? the soft autumn air? the drone of a passing plane far off? it would all still be here. the other creatures around me, my family and friends not far off — all still here. 

how proper. how correct. how wonderful!

this mortality is only an imaginary calamity. we just bump up against the wall of our cranial capacity, like any creature of this earth; we cannot imagine nothing.  

but we don't have to. there is no nothing to choke our benign serenity. there is a vast continuum. this story is a chain reaction. nothing may be a long time coming for the cosmos. and even after that...

it wouldn't all be gone.