Wandering Along the Path: Right Speech

I listened to my teacher's dharma talk this morning about impermanence.  This is the truth that Buddha taught.  Our circumstances and lives are constantly changing, as our thoughts and feelings do.  Sadness doesn't last, it comes and goes.  Happiness as well.  The ground of our being is not what goes through our minds or emotions.  It's not even what happens to us.  It's the truth of our human condition that, when we are aware of it, enables us to be compassionate and free of our baser impulses.  I was looking in a catalog yesterday and there were a lot of dogs, mainly labs, in it and I felt acute pain again at the loss of our two dogs.  And I thought that getting another dog would not lessen my loss.  Those two particular dogs are gone.  I might not have a similar attachment to a new dog, even if I picked the same breed and color and size.  Dogs are just as unique as we are.  Then I felt happy that we'd had them so long, and how much delight they'd given us, but I also remembered the worry and problems and all the complexity of loving a being.  It's not easy.  But this is who we are.  We love and lose and risk love again.  We have our memories, which comfort us.  We have the dread of more pain, if we open our hearts again.  But we do, we do.  Because that is who we human beings are.