A big change in the Irish weather these last few days. Wet and very windy,  and consequently the leaves are finally giving up their clinging and letting go. It prompts me to reflect on whether a certain lightness in how I hold some things –  like how I turn my opinions into a solid identity  or how I try to fix  into a definite storyline as to how a meeting or a process should turn out,  how I like things fixed in a world that is always changing  –   can reduce some of the emotional charge which arises from time to time.

Every year, everything
I have ever learned in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side is salvation,

whose meaning none of us will ever know.
To live in this world you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

Mary Oliver, In Blackwater Woods

How do we arrive at non-agitation through non-clinging? When the instructed person does not regard form with these words: “This is mine, this I am, this is my self.”

The form of his changes and alters, but with the change and alteration of form, sorrow, lamentation, pain, displeasure and despair do not arise.