Changes

The air is cooler here in Washington. The sky is retreating from the sunlight of August, and returning to its more customary gray. I've switched on the furnace because I was pretty cold this morning. Summer has come and gone. Raccoons are sneaking around my back yard looking for food. Through the pine trees, the occasional oak or maple tree glows with the colors of early Fall. In the mornings, a misty fog spreads out from the surface of Lake Sammamish, dropping wet on the windshields of cars as they move along its length in a long slow caravan of another day's commute.

There's a kind of renewal in every change of seasons, but I've always liked Fall the best. Fall in Washington State is pretty special, and Central Park in Manhattan was glorious that time of year. But my favorite place was Southern Ohio, where I grew up. Driving through low tree-covered Appalachian ranges with fiery explosions of Autumn hues on every hillside for miles around, I was always overcome by the sheer scale of the unbroken beauty of that panorama. So much changes, but please let there always be Autumn in Southern Ohio!

Change is the fundamental truth of Buddhism, no less for Zen Buddhism. It can be a very hard truth to accept. It's a truth not much discussed, at least in so many words, in Christianity, and that's probably unfortunate, but that's just the words. The question of impermanence is at the core of all religions, and Christianity has no disagreement with Zen in this regard. Zen defines a practice that can help one to live with change, make peace with it, more or less, by allowing oneself to be more in harmony with its rhythms. Change seems relentless and merciless, but the familiar cycle of seasons gives a sense of a larger pattern, if dimly through fog.

There may be nothing more thoroughly radical than a deep understanding of change. Viewed through the prism of the impermanence of all around us, desires of the ego lose their meaning, but so do concepts of good and evil, right and wrong, life and death. Once change is completely embraced, what else is left?

No answers here, only questions. But there is a harmony. Perhaps we're like the strings of the theorists, vibrating in space like part of a great cosmic harp whose music can't be heard by human ears. Only one thing is certain.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

-- Dylan Thomas, Fern Hill