Laws of the Dark Trance, 19th Day of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Castor): Consider the dandelion. 

No, no, no, seriously, consider, for a moment, a dandelion. Picture it in your mind. The immediate image that comes to my mind is a bright yellow, multi-petal flower on a soft green stem.  But that's only a part of a dandelion's life. Most of the year, it's a green, broad-leafed, deep-rooted weed, the bane of many a lawn. Later in its life, the yellow petals are replaced by a whitish puffball, and when the wind blows, feathery, parachute-like spores sail through the air, each of which are individual dandelions in and of themselves looking for a place to take root.

We can all probably agree that a dandelion is more than just a yellow flower. It's a continuum, really, from spore to weed to flower to puffball and back to spore again. We might be tempted to think of the dandelion as more of a process, a verb, than a thing, a noun. It's life "dandelion-ing" through existence, following a script written by millions of years of evolution. For all I know, it might even be consciousness dandelion-ing through existence, if you can accept the premise that plants have some low form of consciousness.

So it is with animals and so it is with people. Everyone you know, everyone you meet, even everyone you imagine, is in one stage or another of "people-ing" through life. Every old person was once an infant, dependent on its parents for its immediate survival, was once a child wanting simply wanting to please those parents, and was once an adolescent, perhaps (or not) rebelling against those parents as it sought to establish it's own independence. This old man carries memories and awareness of the various stages he's been, and sometimes I can even image what 15-year-old me, or 21-yar-old me (apparently two of my favorite previous incarnations for some reason) would have thought of one thing or another.

I often get frustrated, even peevish, when people seem to perceive me only in my current phase. Yes, an old man is asking you for directions or doesn't understand how something works, but damn it, I wasn't always this old man. I'm more than just this old man. At least to me. 

I assume other people often feel the same way - mothers and grandmothers resentful that people no longer recognize the attractive young woman of years before, fathers who don't understand why they're suddenly "invisible" to teenage girls. 

I know this, but I fall into that same trap of not seeing people as processes, only as their current appearance. All the time. I forget my neighbor, a mother of three, was once an eight-year-old playing Simon Says, and that she still carries that eight-year-old with her in her mind. I forget that the teenager taking my coffee order is still in touch with the nervous schoolboy hoping the teacher doesn't pick on him for an answer. I forget the guy putting new tires on my car once operated a jeep in Afghanistan. 

We're all processes, verbs not nouns, we all have multiple personalities, and we've all inhabited different bodies in this lifetime.

Today is Castor, a sitting day, and I got my usual 90 minutes in today. But I bagged my attempt to sit cross legged after 10 minutes today. It was just too uncomfortable, and I found that I was sitting there simply agonizing through discomfort, my mind preoccupied with how much time had passed and how much remained, and not at all doing anything I would call "meditating." I used to be able to sit cross-legged quite comfortably for 90 minutes and longer, but that "me" was one of those previous phases I've dandelion-ed through. This current me doesn't have the flexibility of the me of even a decade ago, even though I have much the same tastes and preferences, and even wear a lot of the same clothes. 

That middle-aged man sitting cross-legged in the Zen Center is now this self-described "urban monk" who has to kneel (seiza) to get through 90 minutes of zazen. He's also that 21-year-old who probably could have sat for hours on his head if he got a mind to try that. 

But I need to work on seeing others as life processes and not just as their current appearance, because it's a process that's presenting itself to me, not the static impression my mind creates of them.