Omnia mutantur, nihil interit, everything changes, nothing perishes ―Ovid

 

Woman Encircled by the Flight of a Bird, 1941, Joan Miro

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So often in life, we move beyond what we imagined we were capable of, and breaking through that boundary propels us toward transformation. Someone once said, "Death comes not to you, but to someone else whom the gods make ready." This sentiment feels true to me. The person I am today, living in this story, is not exactly the same person as the one who will die. Life and death will change me. I will be different in some very fundamental ways. For something new to emerge within us, we must be open to change.

...Dont wait. Everything we need is right in front of us. Impermanence is the doorway to possibility. Embracing it is where true freedom lies.


—Frank Ostaseski
The Five Invitations

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If we learn to let go into uncertainty, to trust that our basic nature and that of the world are not different, then the fact that things are not solid and fixed becomes, rather than a threat, a liberating opportunity.


—Carol Hyman
Living and Dying: A Buddhist Perspective

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No permanence is ours; we are a wave 

That flows to fit whatever form it finds: 

Through day or night, cathedral or the cave 

We pass forever, craving form that binds.

—Hermann Hesse

from “Lament” in The Glass Bead Game

Clara and Richard Winston

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be(longing

 

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I have already died all deaths,
And I am going to die all deaths again,
Die the death of the wood in the tree,
Die the stone death in the mountain,
Earth death in the sand,
Leaf death in the crackling summer grass
And the poor bloody human death.

I will be born again, flowers,
Tree and grass, I will be born again,
Fish and deer, bird and butterfly.
And out of every form,
Longing will drag me up the stairways
To the last suffering,
Up to the suffering of men.

O quivering tensed bow,
When the raging fist of longing
Commands both poles of life
To bend to each other!
Yet often, and many times over,
You will hunt me down from death to birth
On the painful track of the creations,
The glorious track of the creations.


—Hermann Hesse

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out of this trust I live

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For me, trees have always been the most penetrating preachers. I revere them when they live in tribes and families, in forests and groves. And even more I revere them when they stand alone. They are like lonely persons. Not like hermits who have stolen away out of some weakness, but like great, solitary men, like Beethoven and Nietzsche. In their highest boughs the world rustles, their roots rest in infinity; but they do not lose themselves there, they struggle with all the force of their lives for one thing only: to fulfill themselves according to their own laws, to build up their own form, to represent themselves. Nothing is holier, nothing is more exemplary than a beautiful, strong tree. When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured. And every young farmboy knows that the hardest and noblest wood has the narrowest rings, that high on the mountains and in continuing danger the most indestructible, the strongest, the ideal trees grow. 

Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life. 

A tree says: A kernel is hidden in me, a spark, a thought, I am life from eternal life. The attempt and the risk that the eternal mother took with me is unique, unique the form and veins of my skin, unique the smallest play of leaves in my branches and the smallest scar on my bark. I was made to form and reveal the eternal in my smallest special detail. 

A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out  the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy. Out of this trust I live. 

When we are stricken and cannot bear our lives any longer, then a tree has something to say to us: Be still! Be still! Look at me! Life is not easy, life is not difficult. Those are childish thoughts. . . . Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all. 

A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. 

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.


—Hermann Hesse
Trees: Reflections and Poems

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we are a wave

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No permanence is ours,
we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

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preparations

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As every flower fades, so with all youth
And age brings different flowers at each stage of life,
Blooms each and every virtue and wisdom
In their time, and may not last forever.
From within every heart, life calls, be
Ready for parting, and each new endeavor,
To bravely and without remorse
Find new beauty in the next other.
In all beginnings dwells a magic
Protecting us and helping us to live.

We shall traverse realm on realm,
cleaving to none as a home,
The world of spirit wishes not to fetter us,
He will raise us higher, to wider spaces.
We're hardly at home in one circle,
Familiar habits make for indolence,
In someone who is ready to depart and travel,
The crippling habit may dismiss itself.

Perhaps even the hour of death
may bring us home to new fresh spaces
The call of life to us is never ending ...
Well, my heart, bid farewell continually!


–Hermann Hesse

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no permanence is ours

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No permanence is ours,
we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

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we are that

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No permanence is ours, we are a wave that flows to fit whatever form it finds.

–Hermann Hesse

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saturnrising
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