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Friday, August 17, 2007

Heart in Seoul

As I sit here at my laptop, I smell them, and everything they are before me: the faint scent of flowers from across the room.

Impressions of the day: rising late: coffee: sitting:

a delicate perfume from some mysterious place within the body permeates the elements of morning.

What is this thing called life? Who can tell? Surely more than we assign to it, when sense like this can bloom.

On my way to the airport--later, 35,000 feet above the planet, traveling at hundreds of miles an hour, where nonetheless tranquility prevails, I found myself pondering where the satisfaction in life lies.

Pondering the immense satisfaction of every small thing.

In each impression, if I investigate, if I take the time to discover the relationship, there is a quite extraordinary quality- a fineness of vibration that resides within the experience of the relationship itself.

It's easy to outsource the origin of this fine quality to the object being encountered, or to my experience of it: that is, to assign its value, the beauty of its finely grained, virgin-smooth-skinned arrival, and its ever-beginning yet ever-ending existence, to either subject or object.

But it is not in subject or object, because within this experience I speak of, the distinction between subject and object is invalid; the experience begins before object and ends before subject. If we seek within subject, we miss the point; if we seek within object, we miss the point.

Within this condition there is only one thing.

For example, the fine crème brulee (a object this subject has developed a sinfully inordinate fondness for) I ate last night. It was not in the crème brulee itself, or in my experience of it... the fineness of that experience was whole, it was integrated, it was not about me or about the stuff. And it is still here right now as I type.

Time has passed it by, but it cannot swallow it. Time is no closed door-- it's merely an aperture

This same fineness is within the air we breathe. It is within the emotion we experience. It is water, pebbles, stones and sand.

From a discovered relationship to it arises immeasurable gratitude.

If we become more specific in our attention, if we become more specific in our breathing, we can attune ourselves to a finer quality within all that is experienced. This fineness is of the universe; everything is composed of it, everything resonates within it, everything expresses it. It is the light that Dogen discusses, a light that is not red or green or yellow or white. It is a light that is not light, but nonetheless illuminates, clarifies, renders transparent.

I think of each of you, friends and strangers alike, as you read, and my wish for each of you is to discover this miraculous quality, this fineness of vibration, within your own life.

May you turn the light of your attention inwards, towards your personal spark of our collective divinity-

discover that every arising, every moment, is a flower blossom filled with nectar, and we are the bees that drink it-

may you seek, may you find, may you drink deep of this inestimable joy that sustains.

And of course-

as ever--

may your trees bear fruit, and your wells yield water.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Back, with orchids blooming

And all of that is food.

I'm jet lagged today and my usually nimble mind is a bit slow. I see how my parts are disconnected, how it is somewhat difficult to bring the various centers to each other. Chemistry gets discombobulated when physical, organic time is set against itself. This reminds me of how much we rely on chemistry itself for our daily bread.

How do we feed ourselves? What do we feed ourselves with? If we begin to sense the finer vibrations within each moment, I think the understanding of life as food deepens. This act of constantly ingesting life becomes more joyful.

For example: last night, pulling into the driveway after about 2 hrs of sleep in a 27-hour day, I had a fleeting impression of the back end of my Prius and thought to myself, "Hey. My car has been in an accident." Then, as we passed the back end, and no real damage seemed evident, I thought to myself, "......nah. I'm just overtired."

Fast forward to this morning. The car had been in an accident (what incredible, subliminal part of my overtired brain had detected those front-end scrapes in murky darkness?) courtesy of my overconfident 16 year old son, Adriaan. There I am, fresh home from Asia, and part of me is pissed. This happened, like, Monday, and no one told me.

Or Neal. Nice, eh?

The other part of me- the part that is not so identified, let's call it part B-is watching. While the upset part cranks up the emotional levels and turns on the hormones, part B is saying. "Whoa, check it out, dude. Look at what's happening."

Meanwhile, Part A is emoting. Whining. Doing the usual part A crap. It looks like about $2000 worth of damage, based on my last scraper. Not to mention the fact that Neal left the window in the car down, it rained last night, and her purse--which for mysterious reasons seems to have a good deal of composted landfill in it-- spilled, coating the floor of the passenger side with enough mulch for a small flower bed. This is adding-insult-to-injury stuff, my friends.

...Remember that Kubrick classic, "The Shining?"

Part B, just because it's there, puts a wrench in the gears. It's saying, "Hey, no problemo. We can deal with this. Just keep cool, find out what happened, don't go ballistic." Part B isn't reacting... it's....

where I am and what's happening.

It's having breakfast.

...Lo and behold. Part B wins! I negotiate the emotional minefields, discuss the matter with Adriaan and Melanie (our resident single mom, who was in the car with him when the evil crime took place) and off we go to do morning shopping.

There's something in me that is all right with all of this. And that is the part that is fed by something finer.

In all of this, within this morning, there is an emotional equilibrium that overcomes the negativity. And I think this is the point I keep making about feeding ourselves properly in an emotional sense, by fostering a greater inner unity.

So--if things are bad, hang in there. Stick with part B.

It gets better.

May your trees bear fruit and your wells yield water.