a love letter to impermanence

Dear impermanence,

You are always here, and yet, I - as an imperious human being - notice you only when you come crashing though my front door.  In what sense can I possibly love you?   This morning you appear as an ancient juniper tree in my front yard, splayed open as if squashed by a giant footfall.  Where my boys once built forts and hung handmade swings, there is a fraying rope, peeled bark, ice-covered needles not yet dripping, and a shattered trunk on the frozen ground.  This is not an isolated case. There is destruction all around today, over thousands of acres of the Texas Hill Country.

I feel the thinnest sliver of a parallel to felled Amazonian rainforests as I take in the wreckage of massive oaks and cedar elms blown apart by three days of an unrelenting ice storm. Water delivered from the sky in this form does not slide off leaves, but encases them in thick cubes of ice.  What is at first sparkling beauty is short-lived:  soon the frozen weight bows the branches and eventually strips the unbearable burden from the tree’s trunk or snaps a limb in half. This extreme weather - fueled perhaps by our human greed, including my own love of this very paper that so beautifully absorbs my words - is now in my line of sight. I am stunned by this devastation and by my own backyard realization that I am complicit.  I feel the weight of Jane Hirshfield’s words, not for the first time, but much more immediately:

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke, we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised, and it burned.

How then can I love this impermanence?   And how can I take my part of the responsibility for it? As I walk the land, I am aware of my death grip on life, the hubris lurking in me that this is my land and that I can protect it from harm.  This is not an oh-what-a-mess-to-clean-up reckoning, but a sit-down-and-sob over the state of our world moment.   But, as Jane Hirshfield also says:

“I have been given this existence, these years on Earth, to accept what has come into my lifetime - wars, loves, trucks, betrayals, kindness.  I must find a way to live in this world.  I can’t refuse it.  And along with the difficult is the radiant, the beautiful, the intimacy with which each one of us enters the life of all of us.   Figure out what is our conversation, what is my responsibility, what must be suffered, what can be changed?  How can I meet this in a way which both lets me open my eyes the next day and also perhaps, if I’m lucky, lets me be of service.”

I appreciate you then, impermanence, along with your sisters uncertainty and change, for urging me to face the realness of transience. When I do this from a place of love, I notice not only the pain and despair, but also the peace, joy, beauty, and awe of the ebb and flow of life.  I find my connection to the larger world, to all of us who are constantly buffeted about by change, and I find more compassion for the many of us who are much less protected from its ravages. 

I stop along my walk to mourn and drop into the sadness of the limbs strewn everywhere.  Still green today, these will soon turn brown and, much later, rot back into the earth.  I mourn not only this particular pain and destruction, but all of it.  At the same time, I celebrate the lives that were here and those that continue to be here, for now, and also those that will rise out of this devastation. What will bloom where the trees have gone?  When the sun’s rays reach the forest floor where for decades there was only shade?

Thank you, impermanence, for another reminder that I am connected to everyone and everything.  Thank you for the beauty and desolation of this connection. Thank you, too, for the profound sense of loss - loss of life, of magnificence, of certainty, of control, of solidity.  I love how you show me that hurting is not always an invitation to cure or to fix.  Sometimes it is enough to sit with the pain, feel it, and allow it to transform me.  At others, it is time to act, to change my habits of consumption, inattention, not-in-my-backyardness.  How I must sink not into guilt and depression but rise to inspiration and movement.  I can work to create anew and to adapt to the consequences of change.  I can ease into the truth of all impermanence:  my own, my loved ones, the loved ones of everyone, and of everything around us.  Impermanence invites me to forge my own anchor from what truly matters:  love.

-Me