The Self as Nature

Thy garden seat resplendent in the sunlight dappling through;

And all the leaves a’rustle singing dew song;

There’s nothing there but harmony ‘tween all the me’s and you’s,

As Sun sinks down and night stars sing along.

(Unknown bad 19th century songster.)

On the yellow chair, under the dragon mesquite,
A butterfly, pale as muted sunlight;
There’s rustling in the thinned-out mesquite leaves.
A cricket sings all to order from the giant tomato;
To the south, far-off human sound—

Suspended in time, thought gone still,
Releasing arcs of wonder, awe, quietude—
A congelation, it’s about me, this time.
There’s bad news in the papers, everybody’s
Humming with some current that feels bad—

This flavor of Now—

Fear obscures forces

Rooted deep in the well of life
Calling for attention.

Its depths are our depths.

Fear makes boundary,
A natural line,
We walk amongst the structures
It has fashioned.
Something happens,
Some sense of oneness,
Or a hint or a dream.
Something someone says.
Some trouble.

And there is resonance.

Think a deep cave,
Blind Polyphemôs waking up;
A rent in the fabric
Intelligence flooding through;
A trapdoor
Opening into Nothing.

There’s this gathering of materials,
High octane forces; it’s Geppetto’s work-shop;
Upheaval, thunder, lightning
Upon the darkness of the waters;
Vision dissolving in Sun-sparkle
In the dew leaves; in the hush sound in the cottonwoods;
Renewing, and renewing, always in search of some perfection;
Always the change—change’s reason for being—

The body knows. It senses creative power
In that presence; it has its feelers
Deep in the bedrock.
We open ourselves to it—
Oh great One—are there unfathomed depths?

I can say no more about it.

Solstice Offering

Previously we have been called to purify, and that subtle work goes on, not, however, by personal agency.

We have been told to purify the animal instincts, avarice, domination, lust and the others.

We are called by the black dragon, whose eye is open, who births himself as fire, and whose roar shakes the foundation of the worlds.

We are called to let in the earth energies. Memory traces kick up in the backwash of the cosmic ray. The imperative is to let go, gently let it go.

Discrimination is there.The whole organism is infused with a different energy. The breath deepens. Some of the traces strike with a fury, yet balance is regained; the mirror remains intact.

On Receiving An Image of Vic and Urgyen Rinpoche

I follow him around the room.
He’s hunched a little forward,
As if carrying some precious item
In his chest.
There's humor in the way his head wags a little;
A rumble of respect, somewhere
In the low portion of my spine.

He’s pointing at a bald man with a shining face;
Behind glasses warm eyes question
An answer--and nothing at all.


‘Take note of this one, my friend.’
‘My friend’ has so much warmth in it
That something shines in my chest
And fills my face.
‘He’s connected to the lineage
Of Suffering and its Dissolution and Return.’

I can only smile.

What is it that sparks such things?
The Friend is there.
How do we tell what is real?
The Friend lets you know.
When will I see The Friend again?
When you are seeing.

ROCK WOOD WATER SKY

The man feels his shoulders and back working the oars, the bay quiet but for their ripple. The sun breaks above a gold throne on a flat horizon. Once the whitewashed villas across the water start taking on color, he stops, lays the oars by. He moves in the gently pitching boat toward the bow thwart and the sack of rocks stowed under it.

He’d chosen each one to fit his hand, and remembers the feel of them on the hillside above the whitewashed house, its forward sloping roof tiles visible through gapped cypresses. Stooping now as he grasps them successively from the sack, the roughness chafes pleasantly the callouses arrayed across the bases of his fingers. Pleasant too the hard prickle in his palm.

He drops one at a time into the calm water, following their slow disappearance in the green depths. Before the last he holds it out at chest level and a thousand mica points glint in the new sun.

*******************************************

A child climbs down the rocky hill path barefoot. He's wearing linen shorts that were once white, a white muslin shirt with billowed sleeves. His skin, the color of the lightly roasted coffee bean he keeps under his mat, glistens in the afternoon heat. Black hair waves out from his ears and falls in his eyes. The compound is quiet this time of day, and that draws him.

He turns into the lane just as a small lizard darts beneath the stone marker. This darter is like the one that watched him when he'd measure his height against it. There was much rain then, but not now. He thinks they are not the same. This lizard and stone are from another time, and he is only what he is now.

In the deep cool beneath the guesthouse eaves, he washes his hands in the water deep in the basin. Some he splashes on his face and arms. Following the stone path away from the seaward side to the main door, swinging it inward.

The air is cooler still. Light from the doorway filters through throwing gold beams on the red tile floor. A low pipe desk in the far corner; the ancient monitor's flickering sparkles its chatoyant surface. The tiles are cool on his padding feet--he sits cross-legged on them and brings the table down to his level. The flickering resolves into a green worm writhing on the screen; his brown foot taps the flagstone for the ley switch.

He wakes to immense green plants billowing all around him, rising in the cool depths, riding pale light toward the brilliance above. He sounds, water coming off him in shards. He wades toward the shoreline, the sandy bottom pushing between his toes. He sees a narrow beach rising toward a rocky hill spotted with polygonum.

He climbs the hill path opening beyond the strand and, turning, sees behind him the water spreading out toward the horizon, ringed on three sides by dense forest. Something has washed up on the shore well down from where he had come onto the beach, drawing a crowd of gawkers.

Turning back to the path, he looks beyond the brow of the hill to a red-brown column of smoke curling up from the deep jungle. Making his way along the gentle slope, the path drops toward the approaching jungle border. He hears far off the rumble of a beast. A three-headed dog crosses in front, one emerald eye watching him as it trots across the path. The air is dense with the scent of repandus.

He moves into a thicket of giant trees, massive boles dark sentinels in the gloom. Removed from the breezes that had skittered across the path leading down, the air becomes stifling. Sweat runs in rivulets on his face and neck and down his back. A brilliant blue dragonfly the size of his hand flies in slow sine arcs around his head; he feels the twitch of the shifting apparatus and the time dilation allows him the jewels on her gossamer wings, the brilliant indigo jade of her long body. He reaches with forefinger outstretched through a medium that is denser than air to touch her before she disappears into gloom. The rustle and whir of insects resonating somewhere; the bellowing of an animal, much closer now, rising through his feet and legs from the ground. The heavy weight of the air urges him forward.

After what seems the interval of a breath a clearing comes into view ahead. Figures with painted faces dance a slow panchanga around a fire. The circle opens and he sees a dancer in the flames whose eyes resemble the xhocalo coals. A man with a head of feathers speaks softly into his ear.

He finds himself kneeling at the lakeshore with the strange man who continues his whispering. The boy does not understand the words being spoken but they move him with the language of the rushes and water birds. After a time he feels cold water at the bottom of the lakebed envelop him, a green nearly black. A gold ring drops into his lap. He breathes the water as if in air, and his breath stirs the broad algal laminae to undulation, dancing dark curtains behind which he glimpses shapeless messengers who seem to have things to tell him.

Later, by the cistern at dusk, he checks his apparatus and finds a strong current flowing from his seat into the ground. That night the visitors find him back on the ridge above the settlement, picking rocks. He chooses one and they come. The deep comfort of many many minds washes over him as his hands go to the red-brown dirt at his feet; a cooling night breeze ruffles the dark curls at the back of his head. He feels something resonating in the left side of his chest, an odd sense of dispersing into the air around him and the soil at his feet and into a great waving presence between the stars. He brings fingertips redolent of santal to his face.

Reminiscence

For my Ithaca friends. A detective story fragment.

He leaves by the side entrance turning north toward the center of town. The forsythia blooms, and he thinks of the warm rains that have soothed him this Spring. Turning east on Clinton, he heads for the small benches lined against the railing overlooking the swollen creek, and sits one facing the shadowed facade of the police station.

There is very little he can do at the moment besides think somewhat obsessively about one or two things his client had said to him, as when she intoned puzzlement that the kind man she saw had perhaps not moved his mouth while speaking. 'Live' things appearing and disappearing at her door.

The afternoon sun, its beams falling through the slatted transit station across the walkway, gradually calm him. He notices the bee bedazzled hyacinths and wonders if they're enhanced. He considers the silver drop he'd seen at her forehead--no doubt hallucinated--and how it had captivated him even before he'd noticed her.

It would not be the first time a certain kind of feeling had led him to a dead end. And yet her way of telling the story--believing herself honest and truthful while subverting the storyline to some hidden purpose--is precisely what triggered his wanting to help her.

He falls asleep without the least bit of fuss, propped against the railing bars. A dream comes to him, one that he would likely remember only as a sense of inner softening: his father standing in a doorway, inviting him in; back-lit by the last golden rays of the day.

He wakes in the cooler air after sunset, thinking about holos he'd seen of the antique Bessemer furnaces pouring pure molten steel into twelve ton iron buckets. About his brother's sense of industry; his nieces, whom he loves but rarely sees. He thinks of oak trees bearing acorns, some at high frigid elevations, some in hot drylands. Giving pleasure and shelter and  sustenance and support. And the deep desire in human beings for making: making the world toward a perfect replica of paradise.

Only to realize that his mind had circled him back to the client. Were he to clarify his thinking now, the pleasant daze he felt might disappear. His right hand lies flat on the bench seat beside him, so he uses it to push himself up.

BODY

He carries a silence within him, and is moved to offer it to a higher power, which he can not grasp and can not name, perceiving it only as Absence, vast beyond imagining.

He recognizes the patterning of his mind: incessant thought, feeling, image, so much of it trivial and repetitive. But too, there is a more deeply felt sense of his body, a solid, silent realm of living possibilities, empty and waiting. And welling up from this, in a cycle of appearance independent of time's passage, hints, images, directives; a flow of intelligence entering his awareness from a dimension folded into the everyday, akin to dreams.

He wonders what he would experience if that intelligence would flow without the resistance of the habitual mind, and drops quietly into contemplation.

His focus on this internal body space, he tracks in his loins a downward flowing opening into dynamic emptiness, as if one would synchronize with that and be taken anywhere, do anything, like the sounding of a deep bass drum pulsing, expanding beyond measure.

He perceives shimmering in an empty space in the region of his throat and jaws, its core in the notch above his breast bone, expanding and pulsing with that same dynamism, a sense of outward movement permeating space with its essential vibration.

In his belly, the booming of the drum comes from above. He feels invited to open a door, and enters a heaving cataclysm, ten thousand voices in the language of dreams, a repository of all that he has ever known or could know, a sense of belonging to all that is or ever could be.

An expanding light field opens in his mind, the light taking all experience into itself, into its infinite possibilities, reclaiming and recycling and renewing and recombining it, infusing it with its own star-like essence; all of this in silence; all with a feeling of surrender into love, acceptance of everything, profound empathy in the heart.

When he had mused like this for perhaps half an hour, the sound of a thrasher calling from his yard intervened. He marvels at this down-to-earth intrusion, and at the other-worldly dream time imagery that seems to have included it.
He thinks of the bird, and of the millions of years during which his kind has heard them, delighting in them, coveting them, waking to their pre-dawn chatter, all represented to him in this moment as an intimate messenger from his own being.

Curve billed thrasher, Toxostoma curvirostre

FEAR

Wisdom runs beneath the surface of events in everyday experience, and is linked to them. When the mind is relaxed in its flow, its deeper layers merge into the stream. Then the world reveals its precious secrets in symbols and stories.

One may observe the stream of thoughts and impressions flowing through the mind dispassionately. Personal boundaries begin to dissolve, and consciousness itself becomes the focal point, a point of combustion through which undifferentiated life becomes experience.

The following is an attempt, with a little literary license, to portray what the process may feel like.

Like a spooked deer bounding up a wooded hillside and out of sight, thought careens away from the density of feeling, the fear left congealing in the pit of his stomach. By old habit, he returns to it, allowing himself the experience of its filaments spreading to his chest and throat and jaws. Shrieking voices converge inside his skull. Resisting the temptations to distraction, he settles in the awful vortex until a silent space emerges, and he finds himself in the quiet breath of his body.

Peace to all who read these words.