4 Tir 1405
Quatrain 15 of 75
“And those who husbanded the Golden Grain,
And those who flung it to the Winds like Rain,
Alike to no such aureate Earth are turn'd
As, buried once, Men want dug up again.”
Reflection · Summer 1405
In summer the grain is growing — the husbanded seeds are in neat rows, the flung seeds have scattered somewhere into the margins. Both growing. Both in the process of becoming. The aureate earth — the golden, precious, worth-being-dug-up-again earth — does not exist. Both the careful and the careless arrive at the same ordinary earth. Not even golden. Just earth.
This does not mean that careful or careless is wrong — it means that neither produces the exceptional posthumous outcome. The gold is in the present field, not in the ground that receives us. In the long summer of a life, this verse is a permission. You are not building toward golden posthumous earth. You are living. Both kinds of grain are growing around you. Both are yours. Both are real.