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Friday, June 22, 2007

Hudson River, 6 a.m.- impressions

This picture is taken at a gap in the Palisades known as the Sparkill gap, the first place north of Manhattan where the huge basalt dike dips down towards the river enough so that people can land a boat and move into the countryside behind it. Consequently, this was the first spot on the western Hudson north of Manhattan colonized by Europeans, and--starting with the Dutch-- white people have been living here since the mid-1600's.

This area also saw the establishment of one of the first thriving communities of former slaves, so it has been an area of mixed race for hundreds of years as well.

There is something magical about this particular spot right here at the river. Carlos Castaneda said that certain places are special, have a special kind of energy, and this is certainly one of them. The confluence of the Palisades plunging towards the river, the salt marsh at the mouth of the Sparkill, and the mighty Hudson River in the distance, combine together in a way that cannot really be captured in any way other than through direct experience.

I come down here often. Last October I obtained a seminal understanding in the spot where this photograph was taken.

This morning, there was a wind blowing from behind me out towards the river. As I walked towards the sunlight, a tide of insects swept in front of me, carried by the wind: thousands of tiny motes shimmering in the sunlight as they rushed towards a destination all their own. These insects are a whole world unto themselves; I am so large, and so utterly immaterial to the nature of their own being, that I might as well not exist at all for them.

But we are not so different. Like us, these tiny creatures have a heritage that stretches back billions of years, and in their tiny bodies carry the same DNA. Amazingly, the odds are that we even share some specific genes in common. Nature tends to obsessively preserve anything that works well, and it discovered a great deal of what works well so long ago that it boggles the mind.

There is a timelessness to it all.

Insects have been swept forward by the wind through this particular stretch of terrain for as long as it has been a stretch of terrain. It is always morning; the Redwing blackbirds in the marsh are forever singing their shrill, lilting songs, and the stately phragmites salt marsh grass is always lifting its feathered stalks into the sunrise.

As intangible as we seem to each other, these insects and I, this landscape and I, we are a part of each other. Along with the trees, the marsh, the river, the gas of the atmosphere, we are all part of this one experience called Earth. Our unique consciousnesses perceive the world quite differently, and yet each perception is entirely true and entirely valid.

You see, there is magic.

The magic is not created by wizards. It does not ride on the backs of dragons.

The magical spell, the secret words that create the living universe, are written in the simple text of G-T-A-C: the four bases that form DNA. And of course, there are other, more fundamental magic spells written in the language of what we call elements.

Why we humans persist in creating ever more perverse worlds of fantasy to entertain ourselves when there is so much mystery and sheer magnificence in the natural world continues to baffle me. If we just open our eyes and look around us, we will see that we are in a landscape ever more alien than anything we could dream up if put to the test. We don't know anything about these organisms around us. We name them and forget about them. Or, conversely, we plot their demise, an activity they are utterly unable to comprehend in any way.

Developing a connection to ourselves means developing more of a sensitivity to this world we inhabit. To invest ourselves in the experience of our relationship to this planet, the fact that we are not at all separated from it. Not in a romantic way driven by narcissistic fantasies about saving the planet, but in a practical way, through the actual sensation of ourselves within this life, so that we become genuinely sensitive to the beauty of the environment we inhabit.

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

Monday, June 25, 2007

gruel and rice

There are times, when I sit down to write entries in this blog, that no one obvious subject has presented itself. That is to say, in the past day, or two, or three, no one specific insight, overarching question, or focused subject is at hand.

Instead, I discover that I have spent the last few days thinking less and existing more.

We tend to view life from the point of view of the highlights. In this overstimulated world we live in, the highlights are often perceived as having to be progressively bigger and brighter in order to be meaningful. We watch this go on in capitalism, where companies always have to be bigger, more profitable, and more productive every single year. We watch it go on in the media, where every film opening has to be bigger than the last one.

We do not tend to watch it in our own lives, even though a great deal of our lives are led this way.

Frustration arises from this situation. First of all, life is not just about the highlights. All of it is equally valuable and equally valid. The fact that we are rarely in a state to appreciate this slips by us in our ordinary understanding. We are all addicted to the big event.

Living like this, ,we can't get no satisfaction. This is a question worthy of serious examination in the sense of our relationship to our lives.

Dogen speaks of the monk who is fully realized as being satisfied with morning gruel, satisfied with afternoon rice. In other words, the monk derives his satisfaction in life from the details, the ordinary events, which have become so feeding that he truly appreciates their nature. Everything that he encounters within the continuum of what we call consciousness has a flavor, a taste, a value that is more real. He no longer seeks incessant stimulation of exotic kinds.

What stimulates arises from within and draws its motive force from relationship. Forming a relationship to the small things, the details, is a worthy redirection of the attention. The more sensitivity we have to a given moment, the more likely it is that the food of that moment will reach parts in us deeper than the gatekeeper.

Of course there is a lot more to it than this. Dogen spends a great deal of time explaining that the way the mind divides reality into dualities, even the duality of "enlightenment" versus "no enlightenment," is fundamentally in error. The mind that pretends to grasp this is already in error. Can we understand that?

If we understand, we don't understand.

Hence I find myself living within the ordinary. There are no special ideas, no special insights, no wisdoms to impart. I am merely experiencing this life. Within that ordinary experience there are myriad details, like the gruel and rice Dogen speaks of. And within relationship to each one of those details, as it is savored, there lies the experience--potentially, of course,-- of the Buddha Dharma.

That being said, the following experiences were of interest over the last day or two.

There are many butterflies at the catnip. The mint grows in profusion. During the day, the cries of a red tailed hawk feeding its young filter down from the woods on the ridge above our house.

The salt marsh at the mouth of the Sparkill is ancient. I can see boulders left there by the glaciers, lurking beneath the peaty soils formed over the last 10,000 years.

In places, between the reeds, no trace of man can be seen.

Trees are lungs. Water is blood. The water must meet the tree in order to form the fruit.

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

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