Midwinter spring is its own season

Although I'm thinking that technically, if T.S. Eliot lived in Western NY, it would have been titled Midspring Winter...for that poetic time when the Spring Equinox has passed, the winter boots are set aside to be stored (not so pompous as to store them yet )  the thick gloves exchanged for thin ones...and then a week into April, a fresh blanket of white covers everything, and then two more down comforters of white are added, and the boots are back and the thick gloves too and hope does not spring eternal, but Spring Hope is eternal. 


This is not about eternal winter though.  This is about an obituary I read titled The Meaning of Meaning, and it brought to mind the oft quoted line:  And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started  /And know the place for the first time


 Or as a friend once said, "When you are 80 or older, you'll look back and see exactly how one thing led to another and everything will make perfect sense."  And I thought GollyDarn that is a long time to wait for things to make sense.  And anyway, what if that is just wrong? 


Perhaps instead of looking back to see where one experience feeds another and grows us this way and that, it is safe (and maybe pompous ) to say that purpose is beyond the end we figured:


If you came this way,
Taking the route you would be likely to take
From the place you would be likely to come from,
If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges
White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.
It would be the same at the end of the journey,
If you came at night like a broken king,
If you came by day not knowing what you came for,
It would be the same, when you leave the rough road
And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull facade
And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for
Is only a shell, a husk of meaning
From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled
If at all. Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured


Back to The Meaning of Meaning:  this man got past 80 and I daresay, he circled and learned and grew and taught all in a life's work.  Lovely piece.