The Quality of Changeability

Earth represents solidity. It represents form and structure, that which resists pressure. It’s what forms the physical structure of our own bodies and the world that we’re a part of. We assume the earth is solid and predictable. We can stomp on it and say, ‘Yes. There it is. This is the Earth.’

But when we start to look more closely and consider the quality of solidity, we realize it’s only relative or tentative. It’s not an absolute.

Abhayagiri Monastery is in Mendocino County, California, an earthquake zone. It gets about a dozen small earthquakes every year, not gigantic ones, just little whoomphs! Enough to wake you up at 1:30 in the morning or in the middle of typing an email. ‘Oh, right the earth moved.’ When we meet with that change, that quaking, that movement of the earth, we may feel stress and tension in ourselves–a quality of anxiety–because something in us assumes that, ‘knock, knock’, this is solid, right?

I remember years ago walking through Montgomery Woods just to the west of Abhayagiri Monastery. Some of the trees there are over a thousand years old – they appear to be massive, solid, dependable forms. But someone pointed out to me, ‘It’s amazing to think that the carbon in these huge redwood trees comes from carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. These trees are just crystallised gas!’

Whether that’s folk biology or real biology, I like to think it’s true. These great, amazing trees–a thousand or two thousand years old, so tall you get a crick in your neck looking up at them–are just air, carbon dioxide incarnated, crystallized into the form of a tree. If a fire goes through, whoomph, then the tree will disappear. In the same way, the buildings we live and work in will eventually collapse. In 100 years, 200 years, 500 years, sooner or later it will all be gone.

…Often, we unconsciously assume that things are solid. Then, when they reveal their transiency or insubstantiality, we are surprised and can experience a sense of fear or anxiety. ‘This shouldn’t be happening!’ Or, ‘That’s not right!’ In these times of environmental catastrophes, climate change, the melting of the glaciers and icecaps, the changing atmosphere, many of us experience great anxiety.

That which we thought was solid and predictable–the weather, the climate, our Earth–is revealing the quality of changeability.

This reflection by Ajahn Amaro is from the book For the Love of the World, (pdf) pp. 20-21, 21.