XXI

One day you pause to gaze behind at the road you’ve walked with this discipline in your keep. A procession of ghosts follow, in solemn ode.

They are your own selves, the ones put to sleep each night through all the days of your practice. Each ghost a memory now buried deep.

There, the child of yesterday’s fear and malice, who raged at noon when things fell apart. There, the version of you that tasted bliss,

the one who triumphed in an act of heart. Victors and losers, all shades of your being, line up together, their differences depart.

You realize each died when their time was fleeing- none lasted beyond the setting sun. Yet none are lost; in you they’re agreeing.

They converge inside as an integrated one, their lessons living on though they are gone. Like ancestors in your blood, they run.

This cavalcade of past selves marches on into the horizon of days that expired. You nod in respect for battles they won,

for tears they shed, for how each inspired the next dawn’s self with a gift or warning. Their existence, though brief, was required.

As you honor them, you feel a warming: not sorrow but gratitude for each “you” before. They are stepping stones that led to this morning.

No day’s self was wasted; each opened a door for the next to walk through, wiser and new. They are many, yet one spirit at core.

In this reflective vision you construe the unity behind your changing guise. A thread of soul runs all the way through.

Though each daily persona lives and dies, the thread-your deeper self-endures whole, stringing the pearls of your lives as they rise.

Eternal return from an eagle’s eye: the you of a year ago, or ten, or twenty, all incarnations of one soul’s try.

Perhaps this practice is rehearsal aplenty for the greater wheel of samsara vast- many lifetimes where spirit learns gently.

As you die daily, you feel echoes cast from deeper cycles-like you’ve done this before in eons past, and will again till last.

Smiling, you turn forward. Ghosts fade to shore of memory. They bless you and remain as part of your essence, a guiding corps.

You walk on, carrying the wisdom gained from all your prior selves, not in vain.