Too Much Metaphor

If you pull the tab and the tiny staple out of a dry tea bag, dump out the leaves and light one end on fire with a match or a lighter, and let it go, it will soar upward out of your hands, dancing a flitting to and fro, a gauzy hot hair balloon ablaze in the air until it withers away to a weightless mound of ashes. This is an old camp trick, somewhere between ‘don’t play with matches’ and a s’more factory bonfire. It will ignite with the same instant, vital explosion as a roman candle, but so gently that it’s noiseless over the camper’s awed gasps, and then it will be over. The spectacle begins and ends with the same immediacy.

If only it could dance above you forever, the scent of dry tea leaves in the air. But it is only after the spent ashes have drifted to your feet that the awe sinks in and you realize what has transpired before your eyes. If the beautiful flame never burned away, we would not recognize its impermance or remember its momentary glow like a special secret. It doesn’t have to be a bittersweet ending. The life of the flame is more beautiful just for having been at all.