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".