What is their life like?

I was standing today on the empty grassland that was once the Homestead of the Berons family, with a sign inviting me to imagine for a moment “what life was like” for them?

I can imagine that they were very much engrossed in those lives and – similar or not to people’s lives today – what I was thinking is that those lives have now all completely vanished. And all our own previous lives have also disappeared like a dream. Not even an atom remains. As Shantideva puts it in the second chapter of Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life:

I shall have to leave everything and depart alone
But, through failing to understand this,
I have committed many kinds of evil action
With respect to my friends and others.

And yet my friends will become nothing
And others will also become nothing.
Even I shall become nothing;
Likewise, everything will become nothing.

Just like an experience in a dream,
Everything I now enjoy
Will become a mere recollection,
For what has passed cannot be seen again.

The Berons looked out on this view of the Canyon. The house is gone. The barn is gone. The work has gone. The laughter and tears have gone. Nothing remains except for, apparently, a couple of daughters who are still alive somewhere as very old ladies. I will be an old lady myself pretty soon (if I’m lucky) and, soon after that, gone.

Candid Canyon

The progeny may live on, but that entire vivid, very real-seeming family life never really took place, not from its own side – it was only ever a dream. Just as I stand here in this spot, thinking I am visiting a solid Canyon cutting through a solid mountain, thinking somehow that this is “my walk, my Canyon” (today at least), soon people will be standing in this spot and in the spot that I think of as my life, my home, my workplace. Nothing is really mine, of course, because in a few hundred months or less someone else will be standing here in my Canyon or using my things, sleeping in my bed, doing my job, enjoying my family — all the while thinking that this is their Canyon, their house, their life, their family, their world. I will be nowhere to be seen, maybe the subject of an occasional thought in the minds of others, “Ah, look at that photo, I remember her! Didn’t she used to live here?” And then not even a distant memory. How many of you remember your great grandparents?

Contemplating impermanence is so important for helping us to let go of the myopic and fundamentally painful grasping at this life as the be all and end all of our existence. As Buddha Shakyamuni said, we are travellers bound for future worlds. Atisha advises us to create good karma now, while we can:

Since future lives last for a very long time, gather up riches to provide for the future.

Where is home?

Talking of which, on the Berens ex-Homestead is a Bee Hotel where some nice humans have dug lots and lots of small holes into wood for the so-called “solitary bees.” Apparently there are 1000 types of bee in Colorado, who knew?!, and a lot of them understandably like hanging out on their own as opposed to with 50,000 other buzzing people in a honeybee colony.

I thought this was incredibly kind of whatever human came up with this idea because, in point of fact, it’s not that easy to find and keep a home. Animals and humans and fish can all struggle with this – so I appreciated this generosity and good bit of karma. Maybe some of the Beerons live here now, karmically drawn back to their previous spot as a bee. Obviously I hope not. I hope they made it into at least another human realm, of course I do, but you never know – we circle around all these different samsaric realms over and over and over again, someone has to be reborn as a bee. In any event, permanent grasping at ourself as “once a human always a human” does us no favors.

A river runs through

Talking of circling, later in my hike, I found myself sitting by a river full of bubbles – one of my favorite ways of reminding myself that I am the river of consciousness that flows from life to life, not an individual bubble confined to one fleeting fragile life. (As explained here: Being bound for freedom.)

When I first started my hike I was Whatsapping a friend who overheard me ask for directions: “Can I get to the Canyon this way?” “Yes, you can, and it will take you beside a beautiful river.” For some reason she found that very amusing, me being somewhere “majestic as usual”, because she, meantime, was hiding in her small apartment trying to avoid the Rio Carnival. She told me that everyone was trying very hard to get happy, having looked forward to this for weeks or even months, and mainly they were getting drunk. Perhaps some brief moments of pleasure here and there, but tomorrow a hangover, maybe a few blurred memories, and no lasting happiness to speak of.

Although any kind of happiness is good, Buddha is trying to persuade us that we can do a lot better than that – we need true and lasting happiness. And one way to get it, perhaps counterintuitively, is to remember the truth of impermanence, to go for refuge in impermanence. We can do this by identifying ourselves more correctly as a traveler bound for future lives, in which case we will be interested in going for refuge to a supreme unchanging friend who will be here throughout our whole journey, and who, unlike our fellow samsaric beings, will never desert us. That would be Buddha. The members of the Beron family probably did count on each other in that life, but they could not help each other on their deathbeds and beyond.

If you would like to read more, clicking on any of the images will take you to a relevant article.

 Over to you, comments welcome!