Excerpt from my up coming paper: Buddhism and Nature

A single raindrop hits the water and creates concentric circular ripples extending outward. Another drop hits as the rain begins to fall. More and more drops and now the ripples flow through one another. More drops, countless drops and it is raining so hard that the ripples are hard to distinguish. Constant changing from still to active and back to still. Two raindrops send ripples outward interacting like fault lines smashing into each other and creating different ripples. Each drop separate, separate ripples, yet interact to become one body of water. In time the lakes and rivers and oceans dry up and form somewhere else. Mountains emerge and crumble, people die and are born, species exist and they disappear. I am the raindrop. I am the fault line. I am the earthquake. I dry up and disappear and reform somewhere else.

I see that I am only alive in the sense that this ego understands that I am alive now. I know I will die. I know that life will continue on and that I am part of that. So, what do I have to defend against? Why do the concentric circular ripples from other raindrops trigger fear and defenses? They can’t save me, my defenses. I am already dead. It’s important to me that I live now AND when I see the circular nature of time I know that it is unimportant that I live. Like an ant in a hive, I die yet I that is one with the hive lives on. The raindrop is a single form until it hits the water. I am not separate from nature, I am a drop of water falling from the sky heading to the pool, to my individual death, to my re-emergence as the pool, ready for the next transformation.

This is reincarnation. This is enlightenment. This is salvation. This is magic. This is nature.