A Set of Waves

Saturday, August 10, 2013:

This existence of ours is as transient as autumn clouds.

To watch the birth and death of beings is like looking at

     the movements of a dance.

A lifetime is like a flash of lightening in the sky,

Rushing by, like a torrent down a steep mountain.

Attributed to the Buddha

By Sogyal Rinpoche

 in Glimpse After Glimpse

&

I was reading an article yesterday on the earliest migrations of homo-sapiens from Africa in an old Archaeology magazine I keep in a rack next to the toilet. The estimation of that event keeps getting pushed back… now it is about 125,000 years ago. That is only 75,000 years after evolving from homo-erectus 200,000 years ago. But, in the big picture, this is nothing. Neanderthals were walking around Europe for a million years before these newcomers arrived. Then, since it was my birthday, I thought of the sixty-seven completed orbits around the sun that I have been enjoying. That brought me to think of how long this beautiful planet has been in this orbit: that is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years. It is hard to imagine those numbers… hell, a million years is an infinite number compared to my brief span: the dinosaurs left us only sixty-million years ago. How brief have the millenniums and centuries of agriculture… societies … cities… religious institutions that had all the answers… civilizations and nations claiming to be eternal that have come and gone… how short a period these have all these been?… and so on.

            There was a time when this would have caused me to despair as I’d sink into feelings of insignificance… by the hopelessness of it all… my life a mere spark… at the thought of it overwhelmed me. But it was in that instance I saw the glory of it… the wonder of life... the gift of these few precious years… a sense of gratitude and awe opened my heart to the realization that time is marching on whether I want it to or not so I might as well ride it like my brief span here is but the one wave in a billion sets of waves that I can ride: so, I surf on the wonder of it all!

geo 5,430