Kneeling On The Path - Experiences With Joy

“In the roundel of seasons there is never more than a pause. The rising and falling light never stops, and we are about to be carried on summer winds across the skies. Like a song come to its last refrain, spring turns away and with a backward glance promises to meet us again. The solstice reminds us the everything keeps changing—from the drying wheat on the high plains, to the young, gree corn on the prairie, and to the wheeling purple martins of morning and evening. Nature moves into high gear and the towering light moves us toward physical optimum, carrying our spirits along on the One Breath that animates everything.” By Marv & Nancy Hiles (The Almanac of the Soul)

I remember attending a buddhist gathering. The speaker was exploring the topic of impermanence and said, “About the only thing that doesn’t change, is that everything is pretty much going to change.” I’ve remembered that phrase often as my life keeps unfolding in all kinds of intentional and unexpected ways. I understand intellectually that change is as natural and inevitable as the turn of the seasons. I actually love the change of seasons, the shifting of colors, the quality of light, the way certain birds only visit my feeders in the winter and the blessed coolness of the pond in the summer. But as I’ve gotten older the endless summers of my childhood seem to have gotten shorter as each glowing autumn ends a little too soon, every spring waves goodbye before I’m ready.

Perhaps that is the way of things, as children we know nothing of endings, because we are new and as my friend Parker J. Palmer says “on the brink of everything”. As adults we understand the passing of things - a summer vacation ends and school begins, autumn fades and the snow falls, a job we loved no longer fits, our daily relationship with someone we love transforms as they pass from this mystery to the next.