Within a culture, pattern is imbued with meaning, and that meaning deepens through repetition of practice or ritual, and through teaching those patterns, reflecting upon their shared meaning. These are fundamental human strategies for getting along together, and for working with the discomfort of uncertainty, the pain of change, and fear of the pain of change. They are strategies at the cultural, interpersonal level, and intrapersonal.

When we practice noticing how our biases and attachments show up in body and mind, we are more likely to be able to perceive them in the context of daily life. As we become more adept at noticing and unpacking our stories around them, we are more able to discern, with awareness, what to do with those signals. Sometimes aversion really is about danger, and you need to get out of there. Or attraction might point you toward something benevolent that supports your well-being. Regardless, there is real benefit to bringing unconscious bias into consciousness, to notice what we are holding onto despite our better intentions. It gives us the ability to self-correct and act in the world with more clarity.

I am thinking still of the ways that nature can point the way to rest, to surrender, toward a kind of active peace. The inescapable, inexorable quality of nature is change. Presence with this truth can release us from the suffering that comes when we go against that grain. This is a buddhist argument: all is change. Resistance to change, fear of it, attempts to control it, are the root cause of suffering. It’s one thing to read and think this, another to experience it. And it is another matter entirely to remember, moment to moment.

Anitya — impermanence — is a central doctrine in Buddhism: all phenomenal, temporal things change. Or, all things with a cause are impermanent. When I think about all things changing, I can trip into worry or fear, anticipatory grief. And yet to surrender to the elemental nature of change, to be in harmony with it, is so comforting. Nature shows this, being knows this, when we let it be.

I have had a distinct desire to reach back into my memory and my notebooks, to dip into a current that was disrupted, four or five years ago. What was it, and can I still find it, to ride a part of it into now? Can I braid a lost wave into the current current?