Impermanence: Nothing Lasts – Except My Wish That Things Would Stay the Same

There I was, out in the woods, my favorite place to be. And once again I was wielding my trusty point-and-shoot camera, hoping that by taking photos of every lovely thing that came along I could make this moment last. Make it indelible. Make it permanent.

Later, back home, I downloaded the photos and scoured the Internet for the names of the plants and animals I’d digitally captured. I gave each photo a label.

The Buddhists have a name for this kind of behavior. They call it clinging. Westerners call it greed, getting attached to the temporal and earthly at the expensive of things eternal and divine. Greedy clinging is not good for you, wise folks of every tradition will tell you. It’ll make you suffer.

Some of us do it anyway. We cling.  We cling to stuff. We cling to moments in time. Last summer while vacationing on one of the woodsy, marshy, rocky San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest, I found lots to get greedy about.

I clung, for example, to the the local flora: Rotting logs coated with moss. Granite boulders painted orange with sunburst lichen. Slimy strands of kelp tossed ashore to dry on the beach. Tall stands of fireweed waving pink-to-purple blossoms in my face. Eagles nesting overhead, their scat splattered across my path, fertilizing the bunchberry.

The truth is, of course, nothing lasts. Especially not four days spent in a cabin in the woods with friends. Like it or not, we have to move on. There’s always a plane to catch, a deadline to meet, someplace to be.

You can’t sit on this fallen tree trunk indefinitely, stroking the furry moss growing out of its rot. And, no, you can’t keep wading into the pickle grass, or walking around and around that same patch of fireweed studying the petals as their colors shift in the sunlight from pink to violet and back to pink.

But you can take photos. That’s one way to hang on to the moment. Also, it helps to get the names of things. Name a thing and you’ve pinned it to your brain; it doesn’t slip off into oblivion quite so fast.

But it was getting dark. It was dinner time. People would be setting the table soon. It was time to let go of this moment and move on to the next. A pretty good moment was on its way, come to think of it. It was going to involve a glass of wine and a pot of fish stew.

But the blazing moment with the pickle grass was over. No two ways about it.

© 2014 Barbara Falconer Newhall

A version of this essay first appeared on www.BarbaraFalconerNewhall.com, where Barbara Falconer Newhall riffs on life, family, books, writing, and her rocky spiritual journey. Her interfaith book, Wrestling with God: Stories of Doubt and Faith will be released early 2015 by Patheos Press.