”Nature reminds us that we cannot hold on forever. Only with letting go can new life come. . . . So autumn always makes me wonder what I am holding on to. What is it that I am afraid to let go of? . . . What must be put aside so that spring can arrive?”
—-John Izzo, Second Innocence: Rediscovering Joy and Wonder
permanence
Morning Trip (311)
“The truth is that we’re always in some kind of in-between state, always in process. We never fully arrive. When we’re present with the dynamic quality of our lives, we’re also present with impermanence, uncertainty, and change. If we can stay present, then we might finally get that there’s no security or certainty in the objects of our pleasure or the objects of our pain, no security or certainty in winning or losing, in compliments or criticism, in good reputation or bad–no security or certainty ever in anything that’s fleeting, that’s subject to change.”
–Pema Chodron
Morning Trip (78)
“In other days, I understood mountains differently, seeing in them something that abides. Even when approached respectfully (to challenge peaks as mountaineers do is another matter), they appalled me with their “permanence,” with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life, our being fills us; in ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity.
Yet in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe.”
– Peter Matthiessen
Nine-Headed Dragon River
Elisa's Spot 