Nightswimming

It seems there are dozens of things to talk about.  I get to my blog and feel such hesitation.  Here it is, Autumn, after a brief but welcome late appearance of summer heat.   My 40th birthday is next week.  The cherry tomatoes are like candy or jewels.      

This song always reminds me of a hot Southern Illinois Summer night in the late 90's.  I was vehemently single, working in a bookstore in the mall.  Had to do inventory late into the night, and the air conditioning was off for most of it.  Afterwards meeting with some friends and acquaintances and leading them sweaty and sticky down the half-mile or so wooded trail through spider webs and stray branches, risking encounters with snakes and other crawly things to cool off at Cedar Lake.  I remember the moon, the perfect relief of the water, the squishy mud underfoot, the vulnerability of being naked, and the intimate energy of a small group of people in their 20's nightswimming.   

My Mom Continues to Be Awesome

Apologies for the all-caps.  She doesn't usually type in all caps, but my mom is 77 and I'm just glad she's no longer internet-averse, and I get a good note from her every now and then.  My mom is a fairly gentle Christian and a hard-core Republican, and mostly we don't talk about these things because we like each other too much.  Though she has, in her quiet way, made it clear to me that she'd love me if I was a devil-worshipper.  


Here is a Bodhisattva story about the Joplin Mo tornado.  

JERRY, WAS VISITING HIS  DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER WHO LIVE IN JOPLIN LAST SUNDAY.   AFTER CHURCH THEY DECIDED TO HAVE SUPPER AT I-HOP.  AS THEY SAT THERE JERRY, WHO LIVES IN TULSA, OKLA., LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW, STOOD UP AND SAID, 'FOLKS, WE HAVE TO FIND SHELTER RIGHT NOW.  THE STORM THAT'S COMING IS A REALLY BAD ONE."

THE MANAGER SAID, "WE HAVE A WALK-IN FREEZER.  LET'S ALL GET IN THERE."  SO JERRY AND FAMILY AND OTHER CUSTOMERS AND COOKS AND WAITRESSES ALL GOT IN THE FREEZER AND WAITED OUT THE SCREAMING, ROARING WINDS AND VIBRATIONS AND SHAKING.  WHEN IT ALL CALMED DOWN, THEY STEPPED OUT AND WERE OUTSIDE.  EVERYTHING AROUND WHAT HAD BEEN THE BUILDING WAS FLATTENED.  ALL OF THEIR CARS WERE PILED UP, TWISTED, AND DEMOLISHED.

JERRY'S GIRLS LIVE ON THE SIDE OF TOWN THAT WAS NOT HARMED BY THE TORNADOS; BUT GETTING THERE WAS A PROBLEM WITH NO CARS.  NOBODY WHO COULD WALK WAS COMPLAINING, THOUGH.

MARILYN SAID THAT ALTHOUGH SHE HAD BEEN BORN IN JOPLIN AND LIVED THERE MOST OF HER LIFE,  SHE WAS UNABLE TO ORIENT HERSELF TO ANY LOCATION IN ANY OF THE PHOTOS.  THERE ARE NO LANDMARKS, NO STREET SIGNS, NOTHING OF ANY DEGREE OF FAMILIARITY.  HER NIECES HAD INVITED HER TO COME DOWN FOR THE REUNION, BUT SHE HAD TO STAY HOME AND HELP OUT AT HER CHURCH AGAIN.  SHE SAID,  "IT SEEMS ODD THAT JERRY SHOULD HAVE BEEN SENT THERE TO SAVE THE LIVES OF THOSE PEOPLE."  

I HAVE A HARD TIME UNDERSTANDING WHY ANYONE WOULD LIVE IN OKLAHOMA, BUT IN THIS CASE IT MAY HAVE BEEN SO HE COULD RECOGNIZE WHAT WAS COMING AND SOUND THE ALARM.

HERE'S HOPING THE WEATHER IS CONSIDERABLY CALMER WHERE YOU ARE.  LOVE,  MOM

Stats!

Oh dear. I have just discovered something that is apparently new to blogspot: Stats. When did they add stats? Or have I just been blissfully ignorant of them all this time?

I've read many a post from you other-kind-of-blog bloggers about your practice with stats: How many hits have I gotten? Who's reading my blog? Why was that post popular and that post wasn't? What search terms are people using to get to my blog? Kloncke wrote a great post about this, and even created StatDragons to illustrate the weekly ups and downs of feedback from blog hit statistics. I have always been grateful that I hadn't the same ability to check and check and check: How am I doing? What does everybody think of me?

Now I do.

So observing myself observing the numbers, learning features of the stats application, like being able to see the different countries from whence the hits have come (hey there, Estonia!); this seems fine. It's the Olympic-level jumping to conclusions, the interpretations, the stories being generated about what it all means about me that starts to feel potentially problematic.

So I'll try to balance this shocking new option for self-obsession with a morsel from Pema Chodron's No Time to Lose: A Timely Guide to the Way of the Bodhisattva, in which she combs through and comments upon each line of Shantideva's Way of the Bodhisattva, a text written in the eighth century, and no less relevant this very minute.

6.93

Children can't help crying when

Their sand castles come crumbling down.

Our minds are so like them

When praise and reputation start to fail.

"We invest so much energy into getting people to admire us, but our reputations, like everything else, are as impermanent as sand castles, and attachment to them causes so much unnecessary pain.

There's a Charlie Brown cartoon that shows Lucy building an elaborate sand castle, saying proudly, "And a thousand years from now, people will see what I did here today and be totally amazed." It's this nonsensical attitude that Shantideva addresses here.

Better to regard yourself as a character in a play. You can take the part of a person who's famous or admired, without taking this identity too seriously. If praise and reputation are as fragile as sand castles, it's realistic to not be disturbed when they pass away with the changing tides. Then you can build a magnificent sand castle, covered with beautiful shells and stones. You can even get people to help you and enjoy it thoroughly, and when the waves come in, out it goes."

sand castle originally uploaded by Ben Amstutz

I Vow To Be Unmoved By Praise and Blame

ghost fart originally uploaded by banjo d

One of my girlfriends would say that a statement like that "takes some ovarios."

This is a new vow. It's a big one, taking on two of the eight worldly conditions. It's one of those Lifetime Vows. It's like the precepts; impossible to follow perfectly, but worthy of honest efforts.

I have previously posted about my addiction to praise here.

I'm afraid our culture continues to inadvertently create armies of praise junkies.

Carol Dweck, a psychologist at Stanford, has done research on children and praise. In one study, she gave a group of kids a test, upon which they all did well, but then they got divided into two groups:

Group 1 gets praise for their intellect. Ostensibly fixed traits. You kids did so well because you are smart.

Group 2 gets praise for their efforts. The process. You kids did so well because you tried hard.

Some time later, the kids get a choice: Take the same simple test over again, or take a harder test that you might learn something from. The you're-so-smart kids tend to take the simple test. 90% of the "effort-praised" kids chose the harder test. And they enjoyed it! Because for them, it's not about the outcome. Or protecting their identity as smart. In fact, the smart kids begin to feel that effort actually threatens their identities as smart kids. Because this stuff should be easy for them. Because they're so smart!

Protecting identity. How much energy have I spent on this?

A few years ago I began to ask myself how much my actions were motivated by fear and not love. One of my preamble vows is "to be motivated by wisdom and compassion." This vow clarifies things even further. And requires a letting go of this assumption that I am some fixed trait, but rather a process.

And here is one of my very favorite Zen stories about praise and blame from pureinsight.org. On this website, Min Xu writes about Su Dongpo, a Chinese calligrapher, poet, and general Renaissance man back in the Song Dynasty.

Su Dongpo wrote a poem. It was an incredible poem. It was a poem about attaining a level of enlightenment so high that the eight worldly conditions (praise, blame, loss, gain, pleasure, pain, fame, ill-fame) no longer affected him:

I bow my head to the heaven within heaven
Hairline rays illuminating the universe
The eight winds cannot move me
Sitting still upon the purple golden lotus

Su Dongpo impressed himself with this poem so much, he had to make sure his Zen Master friend Foyin read it. Su Dongpo

"sent a servant to hand-carry this poem to Foyin. He felt certain that his friend would be just as impressed.

When Foyin read the poem, the Zen master wrote "fart" on the manuscript and had it returned to Su Dongpo.

Su Dongpo was shocked when he saw what the Zen master had written. He hit the roof: "How dare he insult me like this? Why that lousy old monk! He's got a lot of explaining to do!"

Full of indignation, Su Dongpo ordered a boat to ferry him to the other shore as quickly as possible. Once there, he jumped off and charged into the temple. He wanted to find Foyin and demand an apology. He found Foyin's door closed. On the door was a piece of paper, with the following two lines:

The eight winds cannot move me
One fart blows me across the river

This stopped Su Dongpo cold. Foyin had anticipated this hotheaded visit.

Su Dongpo's anger suddenly drained away as he understood his friend's meaning. If he really was a man of spiritual refinement, completely unaffected by the eight winds, then how could he be so easily provoked?

Ashamed but wiser, Su Dongpo departed quietly. We have no way to know what level Sun Dongpo was finally able to achieve in his cultivation. But we can imagine that after that episode, he advanced further in cultivation and made improvements in hisxinxing (mind nature)."

Coming Home Part II

What have 16 years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me?

Bodily Safety
I wrote about the feeling of bodily safety on my first post. This is one of the more obvious gifts of the Festival. Speaking of a different kind of bodily safety, I cannot quantify the effect of seeing real women's bodies, naked, in the showers (or out) every day for a week for sixteen years. Even women who would be considered conventionally beautiful; to see even those bodies and their curves and creases and stretch marks and imperfections -- it was surprising -- to be so surprised that is. I mean, I knew that real women do not really look like the women we see in media, but it was still a shock to see this full range of bodies, and none of them looking like any of the "bodies" I had seen in media. All of them beautiful. I had no other opportunity to experience this reality in my childhood nor my adult life. Not that I have it all together about that, but

I. Have. Come. A. Long. Way, Baby.

I have been given the experience of bodily safety from within. Internalized. I am so grateful.

Sisters
I didn't get to grow up with a biological sister. I was not a girly-girl. I started fighting against dresses at about age 3 or 4. It was clear to me that being one of the guys was a waaaay better deal. I loved softball through grade school, and junior high, but then the human gyroscope of puberty hit.

My aforementioned porn-addicted boyfriend in college had a wandering eye. It drove me batshit crazy, and because I didn't have what I needed at the time to kick him to the curb, I projected a bunch of the resulting insecurity and crap onto the other women he was attracted to. *sigh* It was a rough time. Untenable for long though, and the stars aligned for me to finally say enough! Just a couple years later, I heard on Day Stage THE song that summed this up completely, "As Cool As I Am" by Dar Williams (I am the others! oh do please listen):

And I must say here, that there is nothing -- nothing -- in this world like the feeling of standing with thousands of my sisters to the yearly anthem at Opening Ceremonies, "Amazon Womyn Rise"

Love
In 1997 I fell madly in love at Festival. Seriously. Madly. It was the kind of thing about which I had absolutely no choice. It was a knee-weakening, all-consuming, dizzy-making collision that had an impact on me from the very first moment like a speeding U-Haul truck. It would have involved a U-Haul truck, except that she was from another country, and had all of her belongings in a backpack, so there was no need. It was passionate and sweet and lovely until, for a variety of reasons some years later, it wasn't, and it ended. In my story with all the hindsight, there are no villains, and I would readily do it all over again; maybe just a few teeny changes there towards the end. Sometimes these chapters in our lives just write themselves. Those are the ones we learn the most from, I think.

And just for fun, here's a great FAQ sheet to address the annoyingly persistent myths about bisexuality: Enjoy.

Spirit
"She changes everything she touches, and everything she touches changes."

Ah, Puritans. In my DNA seems to live the presumption that the flesh is completely corrupt, especially female flesh, and the only hope of Grace resides in a distant and moody male God, and that Grace comes only from faith, which is invisible and uncertain in us flawed humans. According to Max Weber, the Protestant Work Ethic developed in this absence of reassurance from the (Catholic) church authorities of Grace from "good works"; so its only visible expression got channeled into the zealous pursuit of a worldly "calling" (work) and the only evidence for Grace would be worldly success. The Puritan asceticism, deep mistrust of any form of pleasure, and belief that "idle hands are the devil's workshop" all congealed in an anxious spiritual backdrop that I could never do enough to be okay. And I'm probably not working hard enough.

So...abandoning the disconnected body and spirit patriarchal white-guy-in-the-sky stuff was only possible because I was able to find an expression of spirit I could see, hear, smell, touch, and taste in the patterns of nature and my very own body.

The snake became a potent symbol for me -- the reclamation of the snake -- from the embodiment of evil and temptation to a potent symbol of wisdom symbolized in the shedding of skin, the natural cycles of death and rebirth. I found comfort in the seasons of nature, the inevitability and connection of death to life, the seasons of a woman's life, the appreciation of the four elements: fire, air, earth, water, (five if you count spirit), every aspect of this Earth and the acceptance that large natural forces exist internally in the form of emotions, and that these are just as pure and whole as a volcano or a gentle rainshower.

Without a local group of women to practice with, my yearly trek to Festival allowed me to be in community with others practicing in this way. I did workshops with Vicki Noble and Z Budapest. I got to experience raising a "cone of power" by toning with maybe 30 women and usually a singing or chanting workshop in the beautiful moss-covered oak grove of the Meditation Circle. It was incredible. And so healing. There is no hierarchy in a nature-based spirituality, but there is an ethical guideline, blessedly simple, "And it harm none, do what ye will." All this was so refreshing.

Magical Moments

There have been so many thousands of magical moments. This is really the biggest gift of Festival, these ordinary and extraordinary moments. Here's a random few:

• Walking past the African Dance workshop in the Community Center tent, feeling the heat and power and joy emanating from it.
  
• In workerville, after getting off my shift a little early and catching much of the Indigo Girls' show, then showering alone under a full moon during their encore and hearing "Closer to Fine" live.
• Unbelieveable thunderstorms at night, wondering if the tent would leak, enjoying the chorus of appreciation throughout the woods after every lightening strike and thunderclap.
• Seeing the amazing womyn who cook the food in enormous iron vats over a firepit in the heat of summer in their heavy gloves, jeans and longsleeved shirts, hats and hankerchiefs covering their faces.
• Tarot readings with clearer significance after a week of quieting down.
• The damp, wooded, shady fern-embraced path from Waterworks Way to Tubman Trail. My favorite walk in the whole Festival.
  
• Every single show with sign language interpreters, sometimes more amazing than the performers themselves.
• Walking all the way to the parking lot after night stage performances were over to use the phones at night. Only slightly intoxicated, calling my sweetie, and then lying down in the meadow watching shooting stars streak through the clear sky.
  

Obviously there are too many to mention. I could think of a thousand more. Multiply that by the thousands of womyn who attend. That's a lot of magic.

Michfest 1995

The Five Remembrances

I am of the nature to grow old;
there is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health;
there is no way to escape having ill health.

I am of the nature to die;
there is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love
are of the nature of change;
there is no way to escape
being separated from them.

My deeds are my closest companions;
I am the beneficiary of my deeds.
my deeds are the ground
on which I stand.

Cody

Cody is 15 years old this year. I guess he is. He was found on the banks of the Ohio River one January in 1994. I estimated by his teeth that he was not quite a year old. He was unaltered, his foot pads were all mangled and his toenails were worn to nubs from living on river rip rap. But all he wanted to do was play fetch. In the river. In January.

My dad is a veterinarian (retired) and I am quite able to allow foundling dogs to come and go, to take them to the shelters without flinching. But this dog was special. I could tell. There was something about him.

We've been friends for fourteen years. He got to live the first half in Makanda, Illinois, on a farm before he began his city phase. He loves people, thinks skateboarding is a crime, goes berserk with leash aggression for other dogs, but loves all kitties.

This is Cody playing fetch on the beach in May of 2007.



He had a health crisis in April 2007 (hence the little shaved part of his front leg), and collapsed. He went to the emergency vet, and as I was preparing to have a paralyzed and incontinent dog, the next morning the vet called and said, "Guess who walked out of their kennel this morning?"

Holistic veterinary care has given him a new lease. At least another few quality years. We have gone so west coast. He gets homeopathy and acupuncture. At least we know there is no placebo effect. This stuff works!!!

Every day with Cody is a gift.

Impermanence

I apologize for these very lengthy blog entries. I do know that people don't have infinite time to sit around and read a huge entry, but... I seem to keep doing it anyway. Onward:

I got back from the Festival last night. I can't help but notice this particular Truth, the truth of impermanence, writ large on much of the experience. This time I spend with my favorite women friends in the iridescent bubble of an incredible and improbable community we all create there seems to slip by faster and faster. I know this is a cliche, and that as we age, we begin to understand this more, but most of my friends agreed, that this year went by fast. Faster than ever before. The joy that we experience at Festival is so fleeting.
These feelings of joy were punctuated by some painful events as well. Let me preface this by saying that these things are not really comparable, other than the fact that they are all evidence of impermanence. Which is kind of like comparing three very different items that exist on earth, and saying that what they have in common is that they are subject to the law of gravity. I would not want this to come off as minimizing anyone's suffering, just because I am mentioning them in the same thread. These things just happened to be painful--some more, some less-- and I noticed that remembering impermanence did reduce the suffering of that somewhat.

On Tuesday August 5th, one of the shuttles, a full van bound for the Festival from the Grand Rapids Airport, blew out a tire, crashed and rolled, killing one woman and injuring many others, some quite severely. We heard the news of this on Wednesday, mainly because one of our friends was not on that shuttle, due only to her random decision to delay her trip one more day.
There is a thread on the Festival Forum discussing this tragedy here, and someone was kind enough to find and share the woman's obituary. Her name was Lynn J. Marshall. Here is her obituary:

Lynn J. MARSHALL - Lake Tapps, WA Lynn J. Marshall beloved wife, mother and amateur Rambler mechanic died August 5, 2008 in a traffic accident on US 31 near Muskegon Michigan. She is survived by her husband Francis, her son Chet, her daughter Comedy Jane and her two sisters Kristen Mauritson, and Susan Martin. Lynn graduated from Kimball High School in Royal Oak MI. She served in the USAF between 1973-1978 at Clark AB in the Philippines as well as stateside at Cambria radar station in CA and Homestead AFB FL. She was the first woman to graduate from the USAF school of diesel mechanics and power production. She was currently employed by the Boeing Company in Seattle WA. She graduated from Seattle Central Community College's architectural photography program and enjoyed photography her entire life. Her unique love and special interest was always her old Ramblers. She was a member of both the Cascade and Rainer Rambler automobile clubs. She was also a member of the Nash car club of America. Her favorite car "Camille" will now be maintained without the love and special care Lynn provided to all who shared her life. We will all miss her zestful pursuit of life; the moon hole will be shut and the wall crank turned off. A Memorial Service will be held at 1:00 p.m., Sunday, August 17, 2008 at the Saltwater Unitarian Universalist Church, 25701 14th Place South, Des Moines, WA. 98198, (253) 839-5200.

We send our love and wishes for peace to her friends and family. We had just spoken to Lynn's sister, who is a member of the Shuttle Crew, the day before this happened. It was just a bland and friendly everyday conversation. It is shocking to see how fast life can change. Our hearts go out to Lynn, Susan, and to all of their loved ones.
Additionally, on the return trip from Festival, Amy P. got word from her partner Dusty that their home had been broken into and burglarized on Monday the 4th. Nobody was home, their cat, Maps, was fine, and nobody was hurt. This had happened early in the week, and Dusty had wisely and compassionately declined to let Amy know until after the Festival. There was nothing she could have done. He had handled everything, though understandably continues to experience the loss of a sense of security in their home. Her brand new and powerful little laptop computer was stolen. She conducted all of her business on this little computer. Thousands of dollars' worth of Dusty's recording equipment was also taken. She will return home in a day or two to take inventory of any other losses, and to find out just how recently her information had been backed up.
Oddly, Amy had shared with me on Wednesday morning, a dream she had the night before about her computer being stolen.

She found out about the break-in early in our 6-hour car ride from Festival to her mom's house in Cleveland. In observing her process through a trauma like that, for her, the physical losses were less upsetting than the sense of violation. Also living with not-knowing. Not knowing what the thief's intentions are with her computer -- to quickly erase it and sell it? To find and profit from any personal information? The mind fills in the blanks with great frightening detail.

We were grateful to have made the drive safely to Cleveland to Amy's mom's house, which has been re-named the "Festival Transitional Center." Though Amy had a much more fitful and difficult night, the other three travelers fell into welcome sleep on actual beds and couches, hot food in our bellies.
Then, yesterday morning, having been awake for about a half an hour, in a quiet house full of sleeping friends, I took the opportunity to review all my photographs from the Festival, deleting any obviously blurry or unflattering shots. I used two memory cards this year, 2GB each (I had about 350 pictures on each) and switched them about midway through the week, just to make sure not to lose any great shots due to a full memory card, and "just in case" something happened to one of the cards. This is kind of silly, because I probably had room for about 300 more shots on each card. I was looking through the features of my camera to find out if and how it could tell me much memory I had left on a card. I found the feature, and it also said something about "formatting." Not thinking very clearly, I chose "OK" instead of "Cancel" and watched helplessly as the camera began to reformat, and erased the entirety of the memory card in about three seconds.

All of my photos from about Friday afternoon until Sunday evening -- gone. I had also taken some video of some of the performances, the hundred or so photos of the parade that my friends spent hours preparing their outfits for, the topical photos I taken since we had gotten our assigned "themes" for our annual Michfest Calendar, the shots of our campsite on the last morning... gone. After a litany of swearing, and pacing around quietly groaning while holding my belly, and the repeated internal echo of this statement from one of our friends we camp near:

"I'm not really taking any pictures this year, because I know I'm getting the giant CD of pictures from Laura..."

After that flood of thoughts through my mind, I was able to also touch into the knowing that it really was okay. I mean, it was just pictures, for God's sake! And another lesson in impermanence.

I recalled an e-mail I sent to Ryushin, one of the monks at the Monastery, noticing a weeklong workshop I had been looking forward to was no longer on the Monastery calendar. Ryushin, described why it had been canceled, and then closed by saying, "Yeah, sometimes that impermanence is a stinker!" Though I have to admit, that the word "stinker" was not the word in my mind.
Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse, in his book, What Makes You NOT a Buddhist? describes one of the four "seals" or truths of Buddhism: All compounded things are impermanent.

By "compounded," he means something that has been assembled out of other things. He describes that after a long period of contemplation, the Buddha realized that

"all form, including our flesh and bones, and all our emotions and perceptions, are assembled--they are the product of two or more things coming together. When any two components or more come together, a new phenomenon emerges -- nails and wood become a table; water and leaves become tea; fear, devotion and a savior become God. This end product doesn't have an existence independent of its parts. Believing it truly exists independently is the greatest deception. Meanwhile the parts have undergone a change. Just by meeting, their character has changed, and together, they have become something else -- they are "compounded."
He realized that this applies not only to the human experience, but to all matter, the entire world, the universe -- because everything is interdependent, everything is subject to change. Not one component in all creation exists in an autonomous, permanent, pure state. Not the book you are holding (or the computer you are looking at), not atoms, not even the gods. So long as something exists within reach of our mind, even in our imagination, such as a man with four arms, then it depends on the existence of something else. Thus, the Buddha discovered that impermanence does not mean death, as we usually think, it means change. Anything that changes in relation to another thing: even the slightest shift, is subject to the laws of impermanence.
Through these realizations, the Buddha found a way around the suffering of mortality after all. He accepted that change is inevitable and that death is just a part of this cycle. Furthermore, he realized that there was no almighty power who could reverse the path to death; therefore there was also no hope to trap him. If there is no blind hope, there is also no disappointment. If one knows that everything is impermanent, one does not grasp, and if one does not grasp, one will not think in terms of having or lacking, and therefore one lives fully."

And that, after this long-winded post, is the discovery with impermanence, again and again. It is the appreciation of this temporary visit to this life, each day, each moment. Remembering how fragile and how complex and how miraculous it all is, we can't help but live more fully and more kindly. Many of the women on the Festival Bulletin Boards were remarking about how this sad event increased their appreciation of one another this year. The break-in really underlined the power of one person's actions. One person can make so much difference in another person's life -- to harm or to heal, and we can appreciate all the loving, healing acts that happen to us all the time every day. All the digital photographs in the whole world will someday be all gone. It is simply a matter of time. Was I actually experiencing the moment I took them? The joy of being with my young and healthy friends will recede into something else.

From the entries in her guestbook, it seemed to me that Lynn Marshall appreciated this life, and lived it quite fully.

I need so much reminding! So I keep the Five Remembrances on my bathroom mirror:

I am of the nature to grow old.
There is no way to escape growing old.

I am of the nature to have ill health.
There is no way to escape ill health.

I am of the nature to die.
There is no way to escape death.

All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change.
There is no way to escape being separated from them.

My actions are my only true belongings.
I cannot escape the consequences of my actions.
My actions are the ground upon which I stand.