The Turtle

Kali comes with a giggle. "Go out an enjoy the world!"

Happily you step out. In the garden there is a cactus wren. She is dead on her nest, protecting eggs that will never hatch. A rabbit screams in the desert as a hawk ascends. The doves scatter. Enjoy the world? Anything you have ever loved will fade and die. Unless you die first.

Dukha, the existential suffering of man. The tiger at your back. The ax waiting to fall. The shoe waiting to drop. Is this what it is? The sense of impermanence? Man's greatest fear is of losing what he has.

It's back there gnawing away and try as we might, even when the body is a torture chamber of physical aches and pains, we cannot seem to overcome the attachment to the physical body. The survival instinct is in every cell.

The child comes sobbing, She says, "How can God do this? Why did he take my turtle?"

I can only see than in the eyes of the Divine, Life is Death and Death is Life.

I can find no other explanation.


Dharma Dharini