Everything changes

There’s a Maple tree outside my home. I’m watching her now as I type, sprawled out on the blankets in the morning sun. 

She’s not a native tree. Someone planted her here, maybe hoping to evoke the four seasons of the Northern Hemisphere. I wonder if she’s happy in this strange land. I wonder if she misses her family like I do, if she ever feels torn between her ancestry and her souls' longing.

She sings to me. Everything changes. 

I’ve lived here since March. 6 months. A flicker of a butterflies wing that feels like forever. My red blood cells have been replaced, the cells in my gut are totally different, my fingernails have been growing 0.1mm every day, only to be chewed off just as quickly. Everything changes. 

The Maple and I are changing together. When I arrived her canopy was full, her bright leaves shading the midday sun. As the days grew shorter, they turned yellow, orange, then blood red like the setting sun. Eventually, she let them go, and they started to float, coating the grass in a patchwork quilt. I’d collect these gifts, sometimes tracing them with pencil, adding watercolours, making my own offering. No matter how vibrant the paint, it could never compare. The leaves on my altar curled and dried, becoming brittle, eventually turning to dust. Everything changes.

Now, on the 7th day of Spring, luminous buds are sprouting from her spindly branches. She is a silver goddess, specked with green bursts against the azure sky. 

‘Anicca’ is the Pali word for impermanence. A simple yet profound teaching. Everything that has a beginning also has an end. We know this to be true, yet somehow we forget. We are in denial about our own fragility. We forget that we will become compost, just like the autumn leaves. 

In our forgetting, we start to take life for granted, even though existence itself is a miracle. We get to be here! We get to experience all of this. The pleasure, the pain, the dull, the exquisite, the beauty and the sadness. Every day I remind myself that one day I will die. My death is certain, yet the time of my death is uncertain. Therefore, I make my pledge again and again, to not waste this ‘wild and precious life’. To pay attention, which, as philosopher Simone Weil once wrote, ‘is the rarest and purest form of generosity.’

I’m so grateful for this path of yoga which blesses me with the gift of recognition, so I may never get lost in the bland absences for too long. So I may never forget what I came here to do. Thank you. I love you.