English – Spanish
If youth were so important, would we not have been given the wherewith to embrace and enjoy it? But trials and tribulations come as a flood to deliver us, to teach us, to age us.
Aged wine, how good! Green fruit, how unsatisfactory! Yet this green fruit doesn’t know. It covets its youth, its strength, its firmness, its expectation of longevity and does not care to be consumed. Yes, it much prefers rather to do the consuming.
Youth must be told it is there to be consumed and not to consume, that it must wait for that which to it would seem so repulsive as if waiting for something so desirable.
Resisting reality, the young one is consumed and loses himself. Embracing reality, time unveils the beauty of maturity and the once young finds new youth imperishable.
Immaturity says:
My will, not Thine, be done.
I want it,
I want it my way,
I want it all,
I want it now.
Immaturity says:
I’m old enough,
I can do it,
I deserve it,
It’s coming to me.
Immaturity is indignant
at correction,
at instruction
and discipline.
Immaturity
harbors resentment,
seeks revenge,
a settling of scores
much in its favor.
It takes only the good,
despising the bad,
not discerning the difference
between the two.
Immaturity presumes
to know,
to know better,
to know all,
despising knowledge
and the paths thereto leading.
Wisdom is an alien
despised, abhorred;
folly is embraced
as one’s dear life.
Yet immaturity ends,
whether by maturity or destruction,
but it ends.
Moon River, Feb. 24, 1991