Why Love What You Will Lose?

We are born and live and die by the grace of impermanence. By what other name can we call this unending change and transformation in which nothing lasts? Louise Glück takes impermanence head-on in her poem “From the Japanese,” asking “Why love what you will lose?” The very next line becomes a koan that breaks the word love open into hot, bright coals: “What else is there to love?”

Beautiful. Its truth runs both ways. All things pass through and cannot stay. There is nothing else to love but that which you will lose, including “you.” And equally, what else could love possibly be but the beautiful, risky human willingness to commit to loving deeply what we also know will change and vanish? 

Loss bestows the full measure and depth of love. When we cannot keep even ourselves from one moment to the next in this passing-through world, love takes no hostages against loss. Mourning is the final confirmation of the great depth of love. “We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go,” wrote Rilke, “for holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.”

In this willingness to risk the potential agony of loss, there is already a loss of the self that is love itself, a love willing to be tested and confirmed in the fire of impermanence. This fire that runs through all things burns through life—in our suffering, in our losses, in our passions, and in our connectedness and mutuality, all of which is love itself. It offers as a strange blessing the fact that there is nothing to hang on to in impermanence, nothing to haggle with in emptiness. We can stop bargaining and start directly expressing the nature of the universe in acts of compassion and caring. 

The way of radical acceptance cannot understand anything, including ourselves, to be inherently separate. Such a way evolves love in creative and affirming tension with vulnerability. Samsara and nirvana, sickness and medicine—these pairs are unopposed in emptiness but continually healing back into each other in human awakening: one blaze. 

Salvaging, restoring, and protecting life is strong medicine too, healing both the protectors and the protected.

Zen finds the sacred order of things manifesting not in some safe elsewhere, but in impermanence itself. Suffering is, strangely, both sickness and medicine, impossible to tease apart in the end. Rather than medicine opposing sickness, emptiness sees in medicine and in sickness a mutual yielding and healing. That we suffer and share this great fact of impermanence together is profound medicine in itself, a medicine that releases compassion, love, connectedness, and forgiveness as the healing source. 

The seamless fire of impermanence empties each entity of any kind of enduring substance, and this includes the self. Since all things, from the smallest particle of matter to the entire universe, share this temporary, passing-through existence, the small dream of separation can drop away into that fire of impermanence and discover there the extraordinary weave of interconnected life. 

I once heard Aunty Beryl Carmichael, a Ngiyampaa elder in Darling River country in New South Wales, Australia, put it simply: “Reality is connectedness. If you’re not in connectedness, you’re not in reality.” With a sustainable, living world at stake, this has become a severely urgent matter to realize and convey. 

There’s no set formula called “how to save the world.” Connectedness can’t be ordered up, laid out, or unraveled. Its fire runs through an infinite network of points of mutual contact and exchange that are beyond explanation and must simply be accepted with respect and gratitude. The direct experience of this mysterious, manifest connectedness is balm to the human heart and mind. Salvaging, restoring, and protecting life is strong medicine too, healing both the protectors and the protected. 

Robert Hass, U.S. Poet Laureate from 1995 to 1997, once gave koanlike expression to our plight along the lines of: we are the only protectors, and we are what needs to be protected, and we are what it needs to be protected from. Yet the excruciating sharpness of the dilemma he sketched out has an exquisite roundness at its heart, for exactly equally, we cannot harm the Earth without harming ourselves; we cannot heal the Earth without healing ourselves; we cannot protect the Earth without protecting ourselves. 

♦

From A Fire Runs through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis by Susan Murphy © 2023 by Susan Murphy. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc. Boulder, CO