What if you knew you'd be the last to touch someone? Ellen Bass draws us in to the brief moments of contact that fill our day and urges us to consider the fleeting nature of every life we meet.
Tag: impermanence
Everything is Made of Mind: Norman Fischer on the Playing-Out of Impermanence and Eternity
"Life is the wind. Life is the water. As long as life appears as phenomena there will be the stirrings of delusion. Delusion is in fact the movement, the stirring, of awakening." - Norman Fischer In this 2019 essay featured in his new book, When You Greet Me, I Bow, Zen teacher and poet, Norman… Continue reading Everything is Made of Mind: Norman Fischer on the Playing-Out of Impermanence and Eternity
Milarepa’s Song of Transiency and Delusion
Milarepa is a much-loved figure in the Tibetan tradition, renowned for his songs that expound the teaching of the Buddha and his own dharmic worldview.
Buddhism’s Most Basic Teaching: Everything Changes
Shunryu Suzuki on our inability to accept the truth that we and everything around us are in a state of constant flux.
Jack Gilbert – Failing and Flying
Fearing future outcomes should not stop us from pouring ourselves fully into today. As Jack Gilbert reminds us: 'Anything worth doing is worth doing badly.'
William Shakespeare – When I Consider Everything That Grows
A sonnet from the 'Fair Youth' series that was occupied with themes of aging, passing time and the transience of physical beauty.
Eihei Dogen – Death Poem
A death poem was composed on one's deathbed, with the aim of encapsulating the understanding of impermanence at that moment.
The Ground is Always Shifting – Pema Chodron
The acceptance of the fundamental changing, impermanent nature of the world is at the heart of Buddhist philosophy and is a constant theme through Pema Chodron's teachings. When things fall apart, when the ground is pulled out from under us, it is not a cause for panic, but rather a cause for celebration.
Erich von Hungen – The Moment
The pinpoint perspective of the present moment can feel so sharp but ultimately always impossible to fathom and out of our reach. As Erich von Hungen writes, it is simultaneously hard and soft, early and late, tiny and all-encompassing 'like a pocket-sized Big Bang.'
Edna St. Vincent Millay – “When You, That at This Moment Are to Me”
This sonnet by American poet and playwright Edna St. Vincent Millay is addressed to a lover and to the latent sense of impermanence and loss built in to all moments when one becomes conscious of great love or great happiness.