Impermanence life's only promise

Read on if you dare to enter the real raw beauty of impermance!

The Dakini Speaks
My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here.
Or if we truly haven’t noticed, let’s wake up and notice.
Look: Everything that can be lost, will be lost.
It’s simple — how could we have missed it for so long?
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.
Let’s not act so betrayed,
As though life had broken her secret promise to us.
Impermanence is life’s only promise to us,
And she keeps it with ruthless impeccability.
To a child she seems cruel, but she is only wild,
And her compassion exquisitely precise:
Brilliantly penetrating, luminous with truth,
She strips away the unreal to show us the real.
This is the true ride — let’s give ourselves to it!
Let’s stop making deals for a safe passage:
There isn’t one anyway, and the cost is too high.
We are not children anymore.
The true human adult gives everything for what cannot be lost.
Let’s dance the wild dance of no hope!

Jennifer Welwood ..

When we really contemplate impermanence, we enter are aloneness.

We can move into the landscape of some primal anxiety often in the background of our busy lives. Almost like a silent hum in which we are running from.

We often long for pauses, for time to be in silence, to be alone, yet in my experience I can fill up these alone moments with meaningless distractions. The find myself rushing around with a mantra in my mind telling me i don’t have enough time. What is this sabotaging, why is it so difficult at times to just sit in nothingness.

I think the poet David Whyte speaks of this in his poem Alone

‘The first step in spending time alone is to admit how afraid of it we are…….and the first portal is often experienced as a gateway to alienation, grief and abandonment’.

I spend a lot of time alone these days. Slowly the aloneness is breaking into a sweet tender intimacy with life itself. As i drop the story of my aloneness and meet the portals of alienation, grief loss, abandonment i find myself growing up, maturing. Aloneness seems to do this. It sweeps away all our magical thinking, our ideas and concepts of a happy every after ending, to the real deal of this life. Everything we love we will lose. It’s not easy and maybe your not wanting to hear this from me.

I am slowly finding the gift in truth, resting in simplicity and gratitude for the small precious moments of this life. So fleeting, yet is that not a gift in itself of freedom, to live what truly matters to us, when we come to terms with our powerlessness to control outcomes, to dictate how we think life should be. A sweet tenderness of loving life as it is, breaks through the heart break of the losses and loving.

Perhaps if we truly face that life’s only promise is impermanence, we can respond to the uncertainty in our fragile human world in new compassionate wise ways. We may be braver, uncompromising in what matters to us, willing to risk and give fully our precious life to what truly we love and matters to us.

I am offering a women’s retreat in Imbolc, it a calling for women who feel they want to show up in their maturity at this time. To turn towards the most difficult questions and find in community together the fire and love to become anchors of light, raw real, tender and fierce.

Much love to you.

Natalie