Ashes. Where do these ashes come from? A long gone home in Baghdad? The ruins of an office tower in New York? The remains of a furnace at Auschwitz? A sample collected at Hiroshima? A long forgotten urn that used to sit on a mantelpiece? The palm fronds used to hail a long dead king? Does it really matter?
Does it really matter where they came from? They’re here, that’s all we know. What matters now is what we do with them, where we go with them from here. We can place them on our forehead and then wash them off in the morning; or we can place them deep within our hearts and say I WILL NOT FORGET. They can be the ruins where we all sit down, give up, and sleep forever; or they can be the nest of the phoenix, from which we will rise up, ever new, ever beautiful, ever alive. They can be symbols of all the evil and sin that we see in ourselves, all that we think we are not; or they can be symbols of our true beauty, our true glory, all that we can become.
The choice is ours. We can continue to long for the return of our long dead king; or we can open our eyes and see that he never left. We can continue to hope for a future paradise; or we can look and see the paradise within us. The vision and future lies before us; all we have to do is reach out and grab it.
Original: February 24, 1993; Revised: September 2004