A week and a lifetime
Are indistinguishable in the eyes of the universe
A wall and rubble of stone
Flit back and forth across history with the speed of hummingbird wings
A process of construction and decomposition
Raising and razing
Because
Monuments of marble are little more than leaves of grass, if you give them enough time to fall
If a wall and its rubble
a monument and a morning glory bloom
a week and a lifetime
are indistinguishable in the eyes of the universe
Then decorating a life is a lot like decorating a sukkah
Because why would you
Spend your precious sweat and your precious seconds
Twisting twine
Or draping cloth
Or picking lavender stems for a bundle to hang from bamboo spine if
A week will pass
And it’ll all return to dust
Or even less than that
A memory
Because why would you
Spend your precious sweat and your precious seconds
Finding love
Or building a home
Or fighting for your community and your people
Or penning a psalm
Or engraining a verse into memory
Or shaking your hips ancient music made new
Or getting out of your bed
And living a life at all
If in a hundred and twenty years, may we be so blessed,
It will all be a mote-sized pockmark left on an infinite expanse
An empty circle holding a where-it-was
A breath returned to the un-demarcated volume of the mass of the wind
Why would you beautify something so fleeting as a human life
why would you beautify what will eventually disappear
But the question really is
Why would you mimic the world from which you were created
The world that paints the sky like a renaissance master class for mere moments at the tail ends of a day just to have its magnum opus silently bleed into blue, or gray, or black without a trace
That sprouts an incomprehensible array of life from lifeless dirt just to have it consumed and disintegrated by incomprehensible array of life
that themselves will return so soon to the same lifeless dirt
Why would you enter the eternal dance whose rhythm goes:
something-doesn’t have-to-last forever to-be-worthy of making it-beautiful
Why would you open yourself to loving something that will one day leave you, or you will leave it
Why would you crack yourself open to this constant tsunami stomach turning seesaw ride just to have it all end almost sooner than it began
If a week and a lifetime
Are indistinguishable in the eyes of a universe
What can we learn by building something so beautiful
Where the mitzvah of it is
That it will last no longer than
*snap*
that