All is impermanent. Everything wears out and breaks down. We can all agree on this, but emotionally, we want and expect permanence. On an emotional level, we resist change, impermanence, and death.
At the everyday level of frustration, we experience impermanence and use daily activities to shield us from our fundamentally ambiguous state of affairs. We expend a lot in order to ward of impermanence and death. We don't like it that the body changes shape, the senses deteriorate, and the mind fails. We don't like it that we age and will die. We are averse to wrinkles, sagging skin, thinning or grey hair. We use products as if we actually believe that our skin, eyes, hair, teeth, can somehow escape impermanence.
We all know we will die one day, but at the same time we have the habit of thinking that things will always be the way they are now, so in reality it is very difficult for us to imagine the truth of our own death actually happening to us.
The aim of Buddhist teachings is to liberate us from all limitations and to remove emotional blocks to happiness, compassion, and wisdom. Accepting the truth of impermanence isn't becoming negative or adopting a doom and gloom attitude, it just means we begin to see through the illusory appearance of things. Accepting the truth of impermanence also means we start to eliminate the habitual thinking that has made us so naive so as to think there is a way to escape uncertainty and death. As the truth of impermanence slowly seeps into our awareness, we gradually and wholeheartedly relax into the inherent groundlessness of our situation.
The fear of death hits us all,
The fear of letting go,
The fear of losing,
The fear of missing out.
I see death as part of one big whole.
A wing of the magnificent butterfly called existence.
A wing, so fragile and yet so forceful.
A little wing that allows us to fly.
Just one wing, for it's partner needs it for take-off.
This partner, called life is its mistress.
Its mistress, its lover, its inamorata, its beloved, its wife.
Both translucent, both covered by the magical gold dust of faith.
There is no life without death,
nor death without life.
To think of such thing is a delusion.
See (really see) life,
Welcome (really welcome) death.
This does not mean don't live life and wait to die,
but live life and live death.
It is 8 am in the morning, the day is foggy and i feel i am in a world of white dust.
I can barely see my tree neighbors, the mountains nearby.
It is Friday, and my eyelids hold a heavier weight than any given Monday...
Yet in this misty, fuzzy, vague cloud I feel the clarity, smell the insights of the Buddhist teachings.
Fía.
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