Category Archives: Personal reflections

Impermanence

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I realised not long ago that I have tended for most of my life – albeit unconsciously – to reckon the worth of things by how long they are likely to last; and this despite the fact that so many things I love and whose presence gives meaning to my own life – small plants, lively insects, the changing skies, the seasons of the year – are ephemeral by their very nature, and they last only moments, days or weeks or months, before reaching an end implicit in their merely being what they are. I love humans, too, I realised, for who they are not for what they might achieve; and humans don’t last long compared with trees, or with the rock formations that are such striking and ancient companions of ours in this part of the country.

The worth of something, as I had unthinkingly valued it, is its essence: the thing that exists, persists, being the thing itself. It is an illusion: phenomena, any phenomena, are empty, surely, of any such essence. They are merely what they are, and that in relation to all else that is, to the shifting patterns on the bright skin of the stream, “the ever-transforming patterns of the cosmos as a whole.” (Reninger) It’s clinging to this idea of essence that gives rise to our constant craving, our helpless longing for permanence that is the growth-point for the whole tragic enterprise of human pride – the error of Ozymandias.

We are frail, and temporary, and lovely; we are precious as all life is precious, and our loveliness, like the loveliness of all that lives, is in our fleetingness. The points of light on the sparkling water last an instant – their beauty is in that. Death is implicit in being born; life would not be possible without it, and it is a loyal friend to the living. All we need is to sit still, and watch the emptiness of separate things; the delicious freshness of impermanence itself will come by like the scent of flowers through an open window in summer. Death will come and sit on the end of our bed, and fill his pipe, and talk to us of life; and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Gratitude and water

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Gratitude is a more subtle emotion than it seems, I think. Oh, it is easy enough to be grateful to someone for a gift or a kindness; that’s not what I mean. There is another kind of gratitude – we might call it metaphysical gratitude, maybe – that is a deep sense of thanks merely for what is. To begin with it might have an object – gratitude for a clear test result, perhaps, or for the safe return of a missing cat – but underlying these there is an objectless gratitude that is close to a simple joy in isness itself. It has to do with accepting what comes to be without wishing it were otherwise, without trying to impose a mechanical order on the organic. Accepting what is given as it is may be the highest form of gratitude.

In theistic religions, of course, the pure impulse towards this kind of gratitude is always subverted; one must be grateful to God for this or that. The heart’s sweet clarity is clouded by forms of words: “Thank you, Lord!” we cry, and the initial flood of joy is diverted into acceptable canals of meaning.

Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where none would like to be, it comes close to the way… It is because it does not contend that it is never at fault.

Tao Te Ching VIII

Free gratitude is like this – flowing like water, it follows the patterning of what comes to be, the organic order that you can see in the path of an ivy strand climbing a brick wall, or the eddies in a river downstream of a fallen tree. To love what is simply because it is – not for how it might benefit us – is the cleanest and truest kind of gratitude, that comes, as Lao Tzu would say, very close to the way itself.

In the end…

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This morning the light in my room was particularly crystalline. The autumn sunlight crossed the floor, bringing with it the silvery blue of the open sky above the trees. Somewhere in that blue brightness an airliner passed high overhead, the muted rumble of its engines just on the edge of hearing.

There was a time, when I was briefly close to death, that a kind of blessed completeness replaced all normal perceptions, and I knew that my life, full as it was of things undone, loose ends, plans unfulfilled, goodbyes unsaid, could be laid down just as it was, and it would be all right. Not merely okay, but right – as it should be. The way would hold all that had been, and this life that had been mine would be completed, perfectly. There was nothing whatever wrong; it was all safer than I could have ever imagined.

This morning, very gently but suddenly, in the midst of practice, I knew this to be true not just in the immediate presence of death. This sense returned in open awareness, complete and sure, that everything – everything – is safe in the end, in the way, in the ground itself. There is truly nothing whatever to worry about. Not even death. Especially not death.

‘Satiable curtiosity*

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It seems to me, as I grow older, that one of the really essential things to cultivate in oneself is the continued sense of curiosity. I am lucky enough to have been born with more than my fair share of it, and to have been brought up by a mother who encouraged me in it.

I have never been able to see an insect without wanting to know its name, its taxonomy, its place in the world; and the same goes for most things I encounter, from the tiniest and apparently least significant creatures to things of cosmic proportions, like the scintillations of Sirius in the night sky. (I cannot tell you how delighted I was eventually to read that Sirius is actually a binary star!)

I am doubly fortunate that getting older seems to have done nothing to dim this insatiable hunger of enquiry in me. Richard Dawkins once wrote:

Isn’t it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be part of it?

It wasn’t until I spent an extended period in hospital, in my teens, that I had the freedom to begin to realise that the natural directtion of this curiosity of mine was philosophical, even metaphysical; and I was in my early twenties before it became clear that it was only really happy in what I learned to call “spirituality”.

Practice is the place where spiritual curiosity finds its home. For far too long I thought that there must be some religious significance to this, but in fact there is no need for such a hypothesis. The wonder of isness itself is quite enough. Lawrence M Krauss:

The one experience that I hope every student has at some point in their lives is to have some belief you profoundly, deeply hold, proved to be wrong because that is the most eye-opening experience you can have, and as a scientist, to me, is the most exciting experience I can ever have.

I feel like this almost every time I sit down to meditate, and it is one of the inexhaustible delights of the journey, the heart’s own song in the velvet fathomlessness of what actually is.

*”Satiable curtiosity” – from Rudyard Kipling’s The Elephant’s Child

Love, friendship and solitude

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I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.

Rainer Maria Rilke (with thanks to Maria Popova)

Solitude, that contemplative necessity, can be a difficult thing. Perhaps it requires the solitary to relinquish all relationships and move out into the desert, either literally or metaphorically, as so many have done over the years. Or else it may be a thing of closed doors, of jealously guarded time in a study, or a bathroom, metered out in hours or minutes and maybe feared or resented as infidelity.

But it seems as if another way is at least possible, as Rilke explains: a delicate and sometimes perilous adventure in shared risk and trust, whose rewards can be as great, perhaps, as those of the relationship itself. I once used the phrase “married eremitism” here, and clunky though it is it does seem to sum up this companionable solitude, and how, eventually, it can become somehow a comfortable thing, sturdy and quiet but eager, almost, in its own way. It may be one of the loveliest gifts two people can give to each other.

“All goes onward…”

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All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

Walt Whitman


Impermanence is the nature of every thing, and every thought. That we are transient and mortal, frail and temporary, is obvious to the least reflection. What we are is like the print of the wind on the sea, cats-paws on the bright surface of what is, here and gone before we know what we might be. And yet the water remains, shining.

To die is no more than that: the bright isness goes on, simply is. It is all there ever was, anyway, and nothing is lost. If we are the one who has not died, there is the grief, and loneliness; but the dead are not to be pitied. They are not, and what they were will always be, bright as the sea after the gust has passed. The clear ground lies open beneath the farthest stars.

The perfect centre

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Each morning invites you to be open and aware, as spacious as the sky that passes through you, recognizing “the precious nature of each day,” in the words of the Dalai Lama. No matter how frenzied you feel, no matter how shoved and strangled by the rush of events, you are standing in a single exquisite moment. No matter where you are, no matter how lost, you are standing at the perfect center of four directions. No matter how off-kilter you feel, you are standing in a place of perfectly balanced forces. Even if you feel abandoned by all that might comfort you, you are held in the embrace of what you cannot see.

Kathleen Dean Moore, Tricycle, July 2022

This is not quietism, not a call to abandon compassion and justice, but a necessary gift of grace, of rest and healing, in these days of fear and loss.

A long time ago now, Bob Dylan wrote, “Everything passes/Everything changes/Just do what you think you should do…” Impermanence is the only constant. No thing exists as itself alone: there is only becoming, and the dance of dependencies, each upon all else.. To rest as the open awareness in which all this arises is peace, and life, and the light that is the very source and ground of what is.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

TS Eliot, Burnt Norton

Without time

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I have written elsewhere of the days when, as a young boy slowly recovering from a long illness, I lay for hours on a tattered quilt under the trees in the old orchard at the back of our house, Just being as one with the endless blue vault of the sky, with the little black ants walking carefully along the edge of the quilt, the big bumblebees in the apple trees, the distant drone of an aircraft passing high overhead…

Andō quotes from Stonehouse’s Poems for Zen Monks:

Below high cliffs
I live in a quiet place
beyond the reach of time
my mind and the world are one
the crescent moon in the window
the dying fire in the stove
I pity the sleeping man
his butterfly dream so real.

The memory of that remembered place on the Sussex coast is not a thing I return to, and yet the condition is where I find increasingly myself again during practice, or at least it is a gift that comes during particularly graced times of practice. Like the medieval Chinese hermit poet Stonehouse, this stillness is intensely real and present. The last two lines of Stonehouse’s poem refer to Chuang-Tzu’s dream of being a butterfly; as he points out, this is not a dream. Nor, in my case, is it a memory.

I am grateful, extraordinarily grateful, that I spent that long year’s convalescence at home just when I should have been starting school. Just as I had no reason or context for those timeless times on the old quilt in the orchard, I have none for where I come to find myself now. Practice is not even a way there. I think it is no more than a clearing of the way to where I already am.

Who Am I?

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​Our generation’s short time is falling away. We’re moving into new terrain. There is a measure of effort involved in coming to some equanimity with the implications of our own aging.

There are the aches and the sags, as we are no longer at the peak of our physical strength and agility. We need, also, to find peace in the new landscape of superfluity, as we no longer are at the peak of our engagement in the world.

Adjusting our views of ourselves can take some time. Adjusting our views of our place in the world and of our further direction can also take some time. The contemplation of these necessary adjustments is meaningful. Our views determine our experience.

New questions emerge, often clamoring for attention. Who am I beyond the functions I’ve served? Who am I when the habits of a lifetime are stripped away? Who am I beyond the persona I’ve presented to the world and to myself? Who am I, bare?

It can be a bit sobering, sometimes even stunning, to realize that there is far less time before us than time behind us. There are fewer full moons whose light we can sit in than full moons whose light we have sat in before. There are fewer pale green springs and autumn’s falling leaves, fewer quiet blanketings of snow, fewer ion-charged moments before a fierce summer storm unleashes itself.

Kathleen Dowling Singh, The Grace in Aging

The other night I awoke, overwhelmed by losses. I was suddenly aware not just of the loss of so many dear friends and more from sometimes years back, people who in some sense are always with me, but of the loss of “the functions I’ve served”, the things I’ve done, or meant to others. I use the word “overwhelmed” thoughtfully: the sensation was like being flattened by a wave, the same sense of one minute being safely swimming, and the next of being beneath tons of salty green, seemingly from nowhere, with all breath gone and the power of the undertow dragging at your back…

The next day I was cravenly tempted to try and claw back something from the passing years, to recover something from the outgoing tide. It took Susan’s insight and courage to bring me back, unwillingly, to some sense of the truth, to begin to see where the steady light of time has taken me.

All that is needed, really, is to let the tide do what tides do. The sea is faithful, and the open ground of the long waves beneath that steady light will hold the swimmer who will only float. We are frail and temporary things, appearances only, even to ourselves; it is the light that goes on, and our practice is only to dissolve in light.