📿 To Be In Cahoots With Life
Spring Ephemerals and Some Thoughts on Impermanence
Hello you, Adreanna here with this week’s dispatch of The Laundry —
Currently, it’s spring and the days are oscillating wildly. From 80 degree afternoons we swing to 40 degree nights. My linen tank tops are sandwiched on hangers next to my cozy wool sweaters.
It’s spring and all that’s green and living has made it’s triumphant return. I’m pruning the azaleas before they put down new buds and pitchforking the fresh crop of onion grass that threatens to swallow everything in it’s path.
It’s spring and my friend just died. They went out spontaneously, leaving behind a rippling wake of shock and love. (A very aligned exit for how they lived.)
It’s spring and our cat is being put down today. The tumor in his abdomen has finally eclipsed his basic abilities.
It’s spring and our toddler just sailed through her very first day of daycare. I’m nauseous leaving her to find autonomy without us, but it’s clear that she’s ready to go.
It’s spring, and it’s a transitional season. Both environmentally and personally.
The first spring flowers are called “ephemerals” for their brief tenure in the landscape. They pop, they grow, they set their seed, and then they retreat for the year making way for greenery that’s more lasting. Ephemerals are a totem of transitional season.
The thing is that when we look closely we can see that we’re always in a transitional season. There’s a quote from Jon Kabat-Zinn that’s been used to the point of cliche that “You can’t stop the waves but you can learn to surf,” which points out the movement of life. When asked to summarize all of Buddhism, Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi gave the pithy reply “Everything changes”.
One of the three marks of existence in the Buddhist cannon is the truth of impermanence. The movement never ceases. There are only slow transitions and fast transitions. Subtle transitions and obvious transitions. The tide is rolling in and rolling out. The ground we’re standing on isn’t solid, it’s liquid.
And the thing is, we all kind of know this. Change isn’t new information. Though I really do think that if we held this knowledge in the center of our experience that we might all be better at surfing. I’m including myself in this. We might be less forgetful of change, less fearful of change, less forceful in our desire to control it. We might be more able to celebrate when the tide shifts in our favor, and more able to grieve when the tide shifts away.
We might take loss a lot less personally. We might take good fortune a lot less personally. And we might possibly even stay perched in a perspective of wonder that our circumstances are constantly remaking themselves in the image of life. We might find ourselves perched in wonder that we have the capacity to adapt. WOW.
This week’s Laundry is largely just me processing out loud. I’ve been thinking that if it’s always transitional season in some regard or another, that it really only makes sense to live our lives with open hands. To allow life to deposit what it will in our palms and then to allow life to carry it away. Try it with me. Open your palms as you read these words. See how little tension? See how much space?
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