Uncertainty and Evanescence

Joan Sutherland, Zen buddhist teacher, wrote recently for Lion’s Roar Magazine:

In our world things are always getting broken and mended and broken again, and there is also something that never breaks. Everything rises and falls, and yet in exactly the same moment things are eternal and go nowhere at all. How do we see with a kind of binocular vision, one eye aware of how things are coming and going all the time, the other aware of how they’ve never moved at all? How do we experience this not as two separate ways of seeing, but as one seamless field of vision?

I’m thinking these days about uncertainty and evanescence. The qualities of not knowing what is coming, and when it does, it begins to disappear. Clouds moving in the forefront, deep blue in the background. I can’t believe how many people have died or have suffered recently, in a way my mind perceives as senseless. And yet it’s always like this. Soaking up and squeezing out.

I feel this, if I pay attention, on my yoga mat too. Yoga offers a space to make the transient more comforting, to feel the play between movement and groundedness, the parts of me changing, the parts of me staying steady to support what comes and goes. It’s not what’s real versus what’s unreal. Like Joan Sutherland says it doesn’t have to be “two separate ways of seeing“.

Our hearts know that when something is born, it’s like it’s always been alive. And when it dies, it’s never really gone.

namaste,