Cycles

Cycles are quite fascinating, especially as everything in existence is part of one or another. The non-linear relationship of things is for me the most interesting aspect of the Buddhist perspective of the universe and its goings-on, especially as it applies to the transient nature of being; that there is no beginning or end to matter. Birth is not the beginning of life as death is not the end; these are merely changes taking place, just as they are throughout that "life". Living entities are temporal manifestations of energy, not at all separate from the rest of what makes up the universe. Physics chimes in with its own version of this as the Law of Conservation of Energy, which states that the total amount of energy in a closed system remains constant. The corollary to this is that anything created is at the expense of something else.

The vegetables that we ate---very yummy ones, to be sure---while I was visiting my parents over the last few days grew in the garden's soil. That growth "used" up some part of the soil, thereby creating a much tastier medium for humans to ingest nutrients (would it not indeed be less than sublime to have to retrieve our nutrition directly from the soil?). Without putting something back, eventually the soil runs out. Well, that's what I was thinking about as I observed the compost bin and my father tilling back into the earth the plant material that did not become food on the table.

Now one might point out the the garden plus dining table hardly construe a closed system. However, the garden and, indeed, we the consumers of the produce are part of the Universe, and the Universe, even in its infinity and if we can conceive that nothing exists outside the Universe, is a closed system.

We---and it remains to be seen just who or what all of "we" consist of---are in this together.