Friday, October 27, 2006

The Natural Order... A Tiger Leaping

Today, as I worked, I let the agitation and the internal upheaval over the loss of our trees percolate its way through me and simply fall away...

The situation is what it is, and, like so much in our lives, it cannot be changed or affected by me or by anyone else.

I am thankful for the beauty and the joy that I was fortunate enough to experience through living alongside the two trees... but, nothing is permanent, nothing is immutable, nothing lasts forever.... Everything changes.... even mountains...

This is the way of the cosmos.. and to resist it is a pointless exercise.

So what is to be done about that?

My heart will learn to accomodate the changes, and to flow with them.... now there will be other plants, other trees, and other life that will flourish and thrive in the newly bestowed gift of sunlight in that area..

There will be flowers in the spring and summer where there were none before, and the worries and the stresses over possible damage and/or injury have gone with the trees.. naturally, they will be replaced by other worries, but, then, they will not last either... nothing does.

This situation is a gift to me.. a gift in the form of a minor tragedy that none would even notice save myself, my wife, some squirrels and raccoons, and a number of very confused birds.. a gift of learning. From this, once again, I have come to face to face with the simple undisguised fact of mortality.. the trees', mine, yours, everybodies.... we all come... then we all go!

That is simply the way it works, and it is foolish not to realize it and accept this simple truth regarding our existence...

So.. this is what I must do. Accept. Realize. Understand. Equanimity in the face of change is a more appropriate response, I think... than clinging and refusal to accept changing circumstance, whatever they may be. The world doesn't bow to my expectations, or to anyone else's... and to expect that something will be a certain way is a fundamental mistake that we all make, I think... time and time again. The answer, in a nutshell is to have no expectations, but to maintain an active, accepting frame of mind.. balanced, tranquil, and prepared to move with whatever transpires... instantly and intuitively!! This is much easier said than done, however... but, this is my practice.




Another work-week is done... and tommorrow begins a meditation retreat for me, so I will not be doing anything save for sitting meditation, walking meditation, chanting, and work meditation for the duration of the retreat. Tommorrow I will wake up very early and begin... I will sit and meditate and I will sit like a tiger leaping! I will sit like a mountain. I will sit like a great gnarled pine on a rocky pinnacle!

In my heart, my trees will sit with me, I have not really lost anything, because truthfully, I never had them to begin with... my fondness for them is undiminished, so they are, in a sense, still here... whenever something of beauty is taken away... something of beauty always remains!

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