Communion

When we meet and greet one of our fellow travelers--and here I mean not only other people but animals, plants, rocks, mountains, the sea--such as the gloriously beautiful red and gold rose blooming in a neighborhood yard I happened upon while walking earlier today--I want to ask, what is meeting what?

A few days ago I had someone come to my office, a sensitive and intelligent woman dealing with a serious challenge to her health, and sometime during our interview I noticed in myself a stealthy withdrawal of attention from our pleasant conversation, through successive layers of thought and feeling and detail, ending up at rest in that--and here words mostly fail--silent, empty space of deep listening.

This "destination" felt profoundly alert to every nuance within the layers of the conversation without being altered in its fundamental stillness in any way; not only that, but I felt an intimate communion with her, a vivid stillness that lay beneath our offerings and responses, emptiness merging with emptiness, so to speak.

I was aware of distinctions in the experience--we were each in our separate chairs in the room conversing with each other; people moved about in the hallway outside the room--yet in another, deeply felt sense, I experienced oneness with everything that was happening. Resting in this silence, the details of our communication, the worries, and problems, the questions and the scrabbling for answers, the attempt to figure out what is to be done; the emotions trailing along with these thoughts--all of this felt as movements or energies propagating from a still center to the horizon and beyond. Perhaps an image would be that of a circle whose circumference recedes to infinity, whose center is empty, yet through which arises the entirety of experience; a unity that includes the multiplicity of distinctions, the "ten thousand things".

Stages of an Introspection

There are times when storms rage, squalls roaring and blowing as if to drown the cities and plains, swamp the world of the living under relentless waters.

Such is the sense he has today, the storms of his mood raging despite the mildness of the late winter afternoon in the desert.

He retreats from this to contemplate quieter regions. The tempest simmering in the background of his mind, he unrolls an ancient scroll and reads there the words of an unfamiliar prayer, and as he reads, the forces that have been marshaling themselves at the periphery of his awareness pour into the chanted syllables, rotating about an axis of silence.

OM. MANI. PADME. HUM.

He feels disconnected from his thoughts, curled on the ground with his knees up in his belly, covering his head with his arms against the pounding energies that would obliterate him. His breath comes in ragged gasps. He feels his heart booming in his chest, gradually disappearing into its thunder, and there he finds the warding.

A hawk announces his presence with a strangled cry; he spies him in the paloverde beyond the garden wall. Welcome, he says. I know you do not serve me, and whom you serve, I am.

He walks the dark hallway toward the door at its end, drawn by soft light streaming from underneath. Pausing at the threshold, he waits a moment before carefully opening it into a dimly lit room. An old woman sits in a high-backed chair, her silver-gray hair falling to her shoulders, her bright green eyes looking out at him, her face unreadable. Behind her, a tall window transmits muted light through a gauzy curtain. After several minutes of silence, she turns her head slightly so that he sees one of her red coral earrings sway slightly against her neck.

She beckons him closer, to which he responds, aware of his own soft footfall. Standing without apparent effort, she takes his hand in hers and leads him toward the window, now shimmering with pearly light, dappling their faces and producing an odd effect on him, at once hypnotic and vivifying. Her hand is softer and warmer than he would have attributed to one so elderly; in fact, he is somewhat taken aback to find himself so nearly overcome by her loveliness.

Pulling aside the curtain, she points to the far mountains jumbled against the horizon, the rising full moon, fat and luminous, riding above them.

He watches a lighted candle as if in a dark room. No current of air, no rustling sound, no scent or sense of presence other than his own. Only the soft flame, silently dancing.