A rose is not a stone

I walk everywhere. But more importantly, I can walk everywhere. Beauty, music, and art are forever seated behind practicality. Like a man waking from a coma, I no longer require a machine to exist.

A breath is wonderful. The intake is cool, moistened air. The skin around your face and eyes are realized as it rushes into your lungs. Sometimes I covet that breath. Sometimes I forget it. Sometimes I long for the breaths I will never take. Sometimes I long for the breaths that I have taken long ago.

But here, I just breathe.

dukkha

the first of the Four Noble Truths, that all human experience is transient and that suffering results from excessive desire and attachment.

I’ve been thinking about the human condition a lot lately. And, it occurs to me, that whoever wrote this definition for dictionary.com must have really struggled to come up with this exemplification of the human condition. It took me eight pages to approach it in a paper in college. But I could have done with much less. And, of course, I was approaching it from a Western tradition.

But there it is. It is a terrifying, comforting Truth. The castle that I see every day has held prominence for 900 years. But it is nothing. Like everything built, it will fall. Not in my lifetime, but perhaps in a hundred. It is a fresh, moist breath in the ebb and flow of existence. The generals and kings that fought for their ideals and their pockets are gone and may be remembered, but are ultimately transient. They are as transient as the waif on North Bridge, begging for my pence. Pence, power, warmth, or recognition. Security. Permanence. Permanence-desire in the absence of permanence is suffering.

Steps tick like heartbeats,
In a timeless city marked by timely monuments;
A thousand ghosts in the weathered stones
Suck the allusion from the plucked rose.

Here am I and am not,
Here was and never was.
A rose is not a stone.