“A little over a week ago we marked the summer solstice—the longest day of the year. I was in London at a conference then, and everywhere on the news were pictures of people at Stonehenge celebrating the solstice. Stonehenge, of course, was built to align with the movement of the sun. On the solstice, people are allowed to walk into the actual ring of stones that makes up Stonehenge, and if you’re standing there—in the middle of the stone circle—at dawn on the summer solstice, you’ll see the sun rising just to the left of what they call the Heel Stone. Apparently there used to be another stone beside the Heel Stone that would have actually framed the sunrise, but it’s gone now. Stones, of course, seem immovable. Permanent. But even stones fall down. And yet we don’t stop putting them up, do we?”

A low ripple of laughter went through the room.

“I don’t know how many of you have seen Nancy Holt’s monumental work of land art called Sun Tunnels,” he continued. “It’s in Utah. There are photographs, but to get the full effect you have to be there in person. It’s a series of massive concrete tubes that are positioned to line up with the sun at the summer and winter solstices. Sound familiar? When I was a child, I thought erroneously that we were closer to the sun during the summer, and closest at the summer solstice. Of course I learned later on that the seasons have nothing to do with how close or far the earth is from the sun. It’s the tilt of the earth’s axis, instead, that marks the seasons. At this time of year, the northern hemisphere is most tilted toward the sun, making it warmer in our neck of the woods. Paradoxically, the earth is actually closest to the sun during our winter. I think this goes to show that what seems to be true may not be true.”

The teacher gave us all a tiny, ironic smile.

“What seems to be fixed—Stonehenge, even—is not fixed. This brings us back to the core teaching of the Buddha. Impermanence. Nothing is permanent. Everything changes.”

He paused, and the entire room seemed to exhale.

“Flowers bloom and die. Stones rise up and are slowly weathered away. People change, too, obviously. We change continuously. We age. Our hair grows. We even shed our skin. This can seem frightening or overwhelming, and I think maybe that’s why we build structures like Stonehenge, or make art like the Sun Tunnels. The stones frame this constant change with the illusion of permanence, and for a moment—while we are watching the sun framed by the stones—for a fleeting second the world seems stable. Beautiful and miraculous. But you know what makes it a miracle? The fact that we are present in that moment, experiencing it fully, before it inevitably changes.”