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.

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.

Grandfather

While walking in the desert I remembered my grandfather. He had come to the US a recent engineering graduate from Kiev, met my grandmother, a grocer's daughter, who later would give birth to my mother; worked as a metallurgist in the steel industry in Pittsburgh and Columbus, and was ill with diabetes and marrow cancer for the time I knew him, dying when I was twelve.

When I was about seven, my little brother and young parents took rail to Columbus from Pittsburgh, a great thrill. 

He spoke to me always with respect, answering my questions about lightning, the workings of television, government and geography, dinosaurs and much more that I don't recall. On Sundays in Columbus we'd sometimes watch the Yankee games on his 1950's seven inch cabinet TV.

Once he gave me a lesson in chemistry titration by taking me to the bathroom and having me hold a test tube, partly filled with the urine I had watched him void into it, adding reagent drop by drop until the color change told him how high his sugar level was. I remember how warm the test tube felt in my hands, and my queasiness, not quite dispelled by his gentle manner. I watched him, propped up in a hospital bed, inject his belly and thighs with insulin; I can still recall his ashen face, the smell of the alcohol swabs in his bedroom, the metallic gleam off the autoclavable syringes.

He was a short, compact man, made more sturdy looking by the steel and leather brace he wore against the ongoing deterioration of his spine. His complexion made sallow by illness. Bald, with soft gray almond eyes. A very neat grey mustache, a few coarse black hairs marking it. I never heard him raise his voice; in fact, he spoke in quiet tones that nonetheless commanded my attention. Something also that made an impression that wouldn't have been obvious to me as a child, only remembered all these years later: a calm resignation, and the strength of that.

I stopped for a moment to look out across the desert toward the western hills. The sky above them purpling and golden this late in the afternoon. Venus could be seen sailing above the horizon, a brightening light in the deep blue. I heard myself say, grandfather, how do you like the desert we live in now? He smiled with my face, looked toward the mountains through my eyes. Suffused by gratitude, I felt the stillness of the day, the gift of contact.

DESIRE

Lately, I've been noticing a vague, undifferentiated desire. Not hunger, but something like it; if I go for something, say a bit of chocolate or some tea, it isn't satisfied. I know what real hunger is like, and real satiation, a quiet hum in the body after some good food. This isn't like that.

Sometimes, I linger with it, and the first thing that peels away is any need to satisfy its demand, which has been amorphous anyway. Stripped of that, it hovers in consciousness, resolving itself into my breathing, or a fullness in my throat, or some other bodily sense; or a thought, or something someone is saying to me; some experience, the desire disappearing in the process. A ghost or a vapor barely perceptible, resolving into the next thing.

It's always disappearing, always not quite there, hinting at some quiet emptiness that is somehow alive. Something like being at an event horizon, feeling the pull toward . . . nothing. The pull itself is the the only movement; the destination is the next thing I'm involved in. Try to focus on it and it disappears into the looking; try to move it around or change it or identify it and it disappears into the effort.

I could say that I disappear and reappear, going in and out of the everyday world of thoughts and things in an endlessly repeating cycle, but how strange to contemplate the in-between, when I am not there, you are not there, but life is!

PLANES

Coming out of work the other day, I saw two fighter planes in tandem banking sharply toward the Air Force base to the south. In the next moment, I shuddered, thinking, there are the killing machines.

Taking the experience apart, what strikes me is the progression from mere perception to the series of reactive thoughts, as if my mind had the capacity for pure perceiving, followed immediately, but not simultaneously, by associative thought, with its own train of emotional reactivity.

It's not significant, I don't think, whether the associations are deemed positive, (Wow! What a wondrous event! Such amazing flying machines!), or negative, (What awful mechanisms of murder!). The point is that they are added on to the raw experience, as if each moment of seeing carries with it a bag that immediately opens, spilling out a chain of reactions, often contradictory, within a system that makes judgements on value. And may follow that with an entire, justified, philosophy.

What would the world be like were the raw experience be given enough space to be just as it is, without pondering or manipulation of the content? A way of being receptive to what is, whether it be the world's objects or one's own streaming thoughts? What penetration into the mystery of these manifestations would be available? When this happens, as it sometimes does, there's a sense of revelation and wonder, perhaps a simple joy at being alive, with little or no separation from the experience. Things appear within a whole, blessed by presence.

FOLLOWING THE RED GOD, FOLLOWING WATER

"This is the moon and stars," he said, "and also these, this chair, this flesh. There is nothing that really separates them from each other, or from any other thing.

"The attention follows thoughts as one would follow a path of stones laid by rivulets from recent rains, leading down toward a wash and west up the hillside.

"Then a thicket of low lying acacia and a hooked barrel cactus on its darker sand shimmering in the muted light, still taking water from last week's rain.

"The path follows stones out of the thicket up toward a nearby ridge, the desert view opening toward the sun setting, a low bar of cloud hanging above it, its underside billowing up pink from orange fire.

"A snapshot opportunity, and a stunning artifact in the resulting photo: A violent slash of red light in the picture's center, angled about thirty degrees from the horizontal, as if the sun's fire had opened a portal within the water and earth. A glowing red bubble on the desert floor seems to spill liquid gold to the ground."

In the cooling late afternoon in Tucson, I could not but notice glowing Venus at twilight. It got me thinking and making tie-ins to my own experience.

The next day, again in late afternoon, when the sun is so mild and the light clarifies everything and paints a gold tint on it, I hacked out some weedy flower stalks under a palm in my yard and later sat on D's flat concrete stoop while she sorted and photographed some of the gem stone jewelry she'd made.

Coming back to my place, I wrote some of what I had been thinking about; here it is.

Venus

Feel the desire of the plant to produce flower and seed. Try to name that feeling and the experience jumps a gap. Feeling is closer to being, seeming to emanate in a clear ray from source. Perhaps it is an older, more refined tool in the racial memory.

In the mode of apprehension taken in feeling, one senses the underlying stillness penetrating experience more completely. One feels beckoned into the fathomless undefined.

It is fertile ground—possibly the most fertile; the root of thought has not been pulled out, shoots come soon. One names and categorizes experience amongst innumerable choices, making stories.

Or one may analyze experience, which amounts to sending a light into a dark well, reflections from the dark bottom, as in a mirror, picturing earlier experiences. These may be ignored as desired. If one desires to penetrate deeply this way, the primordial image in the light itself makes itself known. Here is the true archetype, a creative power center, programmed by interstellar forces.

In this light one may live, still, either angelic or demonic existences; the duality still holds, though less obdurately and with greater clarity of choices.

Feel the plant progressing from shoot to flower to seed, all in a glance, and notice how that process is a function of, and of the substance of, mind. Reflect on the impersonality combined with great beauty and vibrancy . Be quiet often. It is like sipping thirsty from a very deep stream.

On the Road and Back

He revels in the sight of the median strip disappearing endlessly beneath the front edge of the hood as he drives the interstate. A sinuous gray presence disappearing but not changing, as when he'd first driven his father's black Pontiac southward through a soggy afternoon on the first family trip to Miami. The burned hydrocarbon reek of the rusted rattling 80's Dodge pickup just ahead. He notices a long narrow roadside puddle and remembers it had rained the last time he'd ridden to Phoenix. Cottony clouds above now march in stately formation toward the western horizon. A roadside pistachio grove momentarily hides the distant line of ragged mountains.

Skinny black ants scurry across the concrete walkway leading to the rest stop bathrooms; he steps carefully across their path toward the structures ahead. An Indian woman sits in the shade of the pillared highway map silver bracelets and earrings spread before her on black velvet cloth. A long sigh escapes someone from an adjacent cubicle; water dripping somewhere reminds him that he's in the desert.

Back on the road he feels that he's on the brink--or perhaps past it--of an awareness that encompasses all possibilities, that brokers no harsh questioning judgments about anything, because all is laid out evenly, seen for what it is and loved, with something that seems almost to be a choice being given as to what will happen, but a choice made by that un-nameable agency that presides over the whole of it with love and can not in any way be imagined to make a mistake. To name that agency causes its immediate disappearance, and an acute sense of loss, unless it be named: himself.

Something seems to radiate from the region of his chest, not the hard bony abutment he could (and occasionally does) thump with his fist but an insubstantial felt presence that evades his attempts to focus on it, invites, in fact, his attention to become itself, at which time an opening to a non distinguishable objectless expanse most like a whispering at dusk occurs. Suffused with a feeling of the completion of desire. The sun lays a blazing white patch across the near half of the empty passenger seat beside him without however defeating his air conditioner.

*****

Back in his office he feels his identity slipping away from him, between his breaths, before each breath, after. A rushing like the movement of fast water. The breath is carried in it, carried again into the always appearing. It is as if there is absolutely nothing, always appearing. A finger seeks an itching spot beside his nose. A woman with shining black hair passes in the hallway outside his room.

July 6: On Standing Beneath A White-Thorn Acacia In the City

Gray-barked Acacia trunks thrust through the chain link fence;
Cicadas hidden in the branches whine their high-pitched freedom song.
I wonder at the strange symmetry of wire and branch,
Remembering inspecting whelk shells at the seashore as a child,
The sound of waves hissing to infinity.
In the lot, junked cars stand in rows, heat waves shimmering off the roofs.

June 25: Resistance/Allowing

Ever been in that situation half committed to doing something, let's say some task at work on a Monday morning, and half committed to avoiding the experience at all costs? Of course, "half" is a word standing in for however you find yourself in the dynamic between resistance to experience and allowing it to unfold. I found myself tied up in that enervating little knot today, so I laid it at the feet of the Divine Mother and asked Her for help. She came right out and said, "Increase the allowing to allow the resistance. It'll be a relief." It is.

June 17: What to do about dread.

Teachers give you the tools.
It may be a famous one or a guy at work.
That thing you always dread doing, but regret if you don't do it?
They'll tell you Wait. Let it happen by itself, when its time comes.
You might be surprised how often you wait, churning, until
Waiting is seeing. It's always just happening,
And you're always just watching, enjoying the ride.

June 10: Notes of a meditator.

My true essence is not dependent on the thinking mind, being in which is like being in a wind tunnel: the experience of the inner world of thought and the outer world of sense ceaselessly flashes by. Only attention is unmoving, and as that becomes fixed, one feels the depths of its silence.

May 28 Desert after dusk

An orange moon rises above my garden wall;
A lone cricket whines in the mesquite.
Across the courtyard, the gardener and the kitchen monk
are singing and arguing, already drunk.