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Over the past several weeks, the world we have have known - collectively and individually - has changed and transformed in significant, drastic and irreversible ways. Throughout the course of time, sudden and unexpected changes such as these have come again and again, similar in their shock and devastation while being particular to their times and circumstances. Throughout it all, as the poet Tu Fu states in the poem below concerning a devastation of his own particular time, rivers and mountains continue; that which was before endures, remains, and continues on afterward. Certainly not in the exact same way, and certainly not unchanged, but continuing on nevertheless.

What rivers and mountains of our time, what rivers and mountains of your very life, are still flowing and standing tall now, in the midst of this all, and how will they continue on?

Spring Landscape

The country in ruins, rives and mountains
continue. The city grows lush with spring.

Blossoms scatter tears for us, and all these
separations in a bird's cry startle the heart.

Beacon fires three-months ablaze: by now
a mere letter's worth ten thousand in gold,

and worry's thinned my hear to such white
confusion I can't even keep this hairpin in.

                                             -Tu Fu
                                             taken from Awakened Cosmos by David Hinton

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