Spring Break practice

Being on campus when very few are is an experience that is hard to describe. When you walk around Grinnell you always see a face you know (this is at least my experience, but I've been told I know too many people)

Now that few are here, you are lucky to run into anyone in the loggia or the Joe Roe. Many people sleep until 2 in the afternoon then eat boxed pizza and burritos.

This has given me some down time, and plenty of quite. In this I have been able to find a space for more Buddhist practice. I have even been reading some more Buddhist thought and doctrine. I am looking in the most unexplainable places for life messages - like juice bottles... They tell me that "separation is natural" and movies remind me to call my mother more because she is a lonely old lady who worries about me A LOT.
Things are really easy to forget, and I don't want to suck at life any more.

The Buddhist thought that I have been struggling with lately is impermanence
Because I have been dealing with a lot of death this semester
and the loss of Whitney to our Grinnell community (a first year student)
and with my mother's position being dissolved
and my father not working right now either, there is a lot of suffering
and I can't see the point of it
even when I try.
But in my quite hours I am meditating and practicing yoga
and finding myself in this time of chaos


According to the impermanence doctrine, human life embodies this flux in the aging process, the cycle of birth and rebirth (samsara), and in any experience of loss. The doctrine further asserts that because things are impermanent, attachment to them is futile, and leads to suffering (dukkha). Under the impermanence doctrine, all compounded and constructed things and states are impermanent.

Buddhists hold that the only true end of impermanence is nirvana, the reality that knows no change, decay or death.

Impermanence is intimately associated with the doctrine of anatta, according to which things have no fixed nature, essence, or self.

soon I will be atop a mountain
with the cold crisp air - all summer long
I can not wait for this day