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A long time ago, I once thought about a question in front of a campfire. The wood crackled, chewing on the darkness, and I stared at the flickering flames. Suddenly, I wondered: Is a child's task really just to grow up?

The night wind carried sparks into the sky. How many of those stars have already burned out? The light traveled so far to reach our eyes, but by the time we see it, the source may have long died. It's like looking at my own childhood—I still remember the warmth, but that child is no longer there. I didn't properly observe the world back then, and now that I'm grown, it's already a new world.

All streams, no matter how many mountains they wind around or valleys they pass through, must eventually fall into the same sea. Back then, I read Lung Ying-tai's *Big River, Big Sea* and was deeply struck by a similar line: "All the turbulence and wandering will eventually return from the great river to the sea."

So it is with all dreams. Those that seem lost are actually heading in the same direction. Will they reunite in the sea? Will they recognize each other's original forms in the brine? Probably not—but I hope they will. Maybe? I don't know.

The campfire cast my shadow behind me, stretching it long, so long it no longer resembled the me of now. The shadow swayed on the dirt, like another, more honest life.

As a child, I thought the world was an open book, waiting for me to read it. But later, I realized the words could change. Yesterday, I read 'eternity'; today, the ink has faded. Yesterday's truths, when touched today, reveal another line of words written backward on the other side of the page.

Did I, in the process of growing up, truly observe and understand this world?

The fire jumped, startling me. Understand? It seems I at least don't understand this fire. I don't even understand the dog next door—why does it always bark at the empty alley on rainy days? Why does it bury the bones it finds under the utility pole? I don't even understand why something that made me cry yesterday makes me laugh today, or why the more I cherish something, the more I push it away.

Can it be made up for? I asked the fire, but the fire only gave me more shadows.

There was a time when I thought everything was over. Not the kind of 'over' in stories where you hit rock bottom and bounce back, but the kind that rots in the dirt, too barren even to be fertilizer. Like mud in a corner—it cracks under the sun and turns to filthy water when rain comes. To live is to swim through the gazes of others. Some of those gazes are nails; others, spit.

The essence of sky burial is to express love and return. It merges the waters of humans and nature.

But humans are too fragile as vessels. We cannot accept the laws and wisdom of nature, nor can we hold too much deep affection. Even the slightest merging pains us, like a freshwater fish swimming into the sea, desperately adjusting the salt in its blood. In the end, it either dies from the salt or from thirst.

I added another log to the fire. The new log resisted for a moment, then caught flame with a whoosh, surrendering itself. To understand another life may be like this log understanding fire—it must pay the price of destroying its own form.

As a child, I watched ants carry their dead, imitated the first cry of a bird at dawn, even imagined myself as a weightless wind. And yet I was wrong—mistaking the ants' persistence for grief, the bird's song for joy, the wind's passing for longing.

Mistakes piled upon mistakes, like this growing heap of ashes.

But then—the fire flared suddenly, swallowing all shadows and spitting them back out. Things didn't seem so bad after all. Beneath the ashes, embers still glowed red; a gust of wind, and they could reignite. Mistakes can be corrected, like a river carrying away sediment at a bend. Though new mistakes will arise, just as new sediment will settle.

But that's what growing up is, isn't it? Not growing taller or heavier, not swapping children's clothes for adult ones. It's realizing you'll never fully understand the world—and still choosing to try. It's knowing every repair leaves a mark—and still picking up the needle and thread. It's learning to breathe with gills when the tide rises over your head.

Sparks rose, mingling with invisible stars. Some stars are dead, some are dying, some just born. They coexist in this night sky, just as all versions of me sit before this campfire at once.

The stream still flows to the sea. Before it arrives, it has the right to bend, to flood, to break into puddles in drought. As long as it flows.

I reached out to warm my hands, palms upturned, as if receiving a gift.

"There's still time," the flames said, then kept burning, turning themselves inch by inch into ash in the brightest way.

One day, I too will become a log, a heap of ash. I will vanish completely, leaving no trace, slowly forgotten, erased from the root, gone for good.

But the future is unknowable, as is the past; the present is unknowable, the present becomes the past; the future is also unknowable; forget the past, forget the present, forget the future; not coming, yet coming—that is Tathāgata.