Only impermanence lasts..is that another way of saying that the only thing you can count on is change. Since my mother died I have been returning to the things I did before she came to live with me and my life my new life was soldered to hers. My new life was filled with worry and doctor’s appointments and cooking meals with her and for her. I tried drawing because she liked to paint and we had a lots of favorite shows that we watched together every night.
Before mom I meditated and threw pots in a ceramic studio I fashioned out back. I wrote on Thursday nights with my friend Becky and ran in the mornings with Karen. All of that went by the wayside eventually as I concentrated on what I needed to do to keep body and soul together for us both.
I have been sitting with the abbot and his students at the Albuquerque Zen Center which is an uncompromising place to meditate. He talks a lot about impermanence about one minute following the next relentlessly one after the other and that we sit to be awake to this. Frankly its beginning to sound painful. I don’t think there is any down side to clarity but I am not sure I want to be aware all the time that nothing lasts and everything ends.
“We don’t come from anywhere and we don’t go anywhere when we die” he said tonight after sitting zazen. I guess in a way that is true as my mother’s ashes sit in the corner of my dining room in a brown box in a purple bag from the Neptune society. But where is she..cause those ashes aren’t doing any talking.
I know that nothing lasts forever and no one leaves this world alive but sometimes the whole notion of impermanence just plain pisses me off.