In her poem "Choreography", interfaith chaplain Rebecca Doverspike dances from wind, pines, and leaves, to the mental workings of an elderly patient.
Tag: impermanence
The Expression of a Better World – Anaïs Nin on Transience and the Painful, Familiar Beauty of Music
Anaïs Nin on music, mortality, and what it is to glimpse a joyful vision of a land from which we came and which we have forgotten.
Tamerlie Philippe – Fading Memories
Inspired by memories from her country of origin, Haiti, Tamerlie Philippe's faceless paintings are an ambivalent, diminishing recollection of home.
Ellen Bass – If You Knew
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.
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.