Taste the impermanence!

Today I cleaned out my old house in preparation for closing on its sale next week. At the end of a long day of scrubbing, spraying, wiping, washing, packing and throwing away the last dregs of the home I lived in with my wife for most of three years and 8 more months alone, I was weary and hungry. My brother and I had loaded up his big blue Dodge pickup truck for the final time with a load of scrap wood that he would throw in the burn pile back at work tomorrow. It was about 7:30pm and we had been at it since about 10am.

As Dan tied off the rope used to tie down the wood in the back of the truck, I stepped back from the house and looked at it from the back of the driveway, taking it in. The thought bubbled to mind: "taste the impermanence." How swiftly and suddenly my house had become my old house, my former home. Soon it will be no longer mine. And I live in, have moved all my stuff (what I didn't have hauled away by a junk removal service), to a new place, a townhouse where I now live alone with two cats. My new home is somewhere else. Taste the impermanence. Savor its taste, deeply and strongly. Buddha preached it, Jesus preached it: the impermanence of all things, even the concept of home and a possession as large as a house.