text:
# Moonlight
Leaning Against
an Old Rail Fence

# Moonlight
Leaning Against
an Old Rail Fence

# Approaching the Dharma as Poetry

Paul Weiss

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California
Copyright © 2015 by Paul Weiss. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by

North Atlantic Books

Berkeley, California

Cover art by © lalan/Shutterstock.com

Cover and book design by Susan Quasha

_Moonlight Leaning Against an Old Rail Fence: Approaching the Dharma as Poetry_ is sponsored and published by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences (dba North Atlantic Books), an educational nonprofit based in Berkeley, California, that collaborates with partners to develop cross-cultural perspectives, nurture holistic views of art, science, the humanities, and healing, and seed personal and global transformation by publishing work on the relationship of body, spirit, and nature.

North Atlantic Books' publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiss, Paul, 1947- author.

Moonlight leaning against an old rail fence : approaching the dharma as poetry / Paul Weiss.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-58394-945-0 (paperback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-58394-946-7 (ebook)

1. Buddhist poetry, American. I. Title.

PS3573.E41625M66 2015

811'.6—dc23

2014025225
for Lex Hixon,

who in ways I do and do not understand is spiritual godfather to this book, and who continues to teach me from beyond the grave

for Martín Prechtel,

who gave me a hand down into the well of ecstatic memory

and showed me an earth big enough to hold my grief

for Walter Nowick,

who first pinched my ass so many decades ago

for Sifu Sheng-yen,

who said the word "Relinquish" at just the right moment

for Sant Ajaib Singh Ji Maharaj,

who graciously drew me into his Body of Light

for Alexandra,

and the divine family gifted us in this earthly cycle

and for Joey
_and for the reader_

martín says

the only way to die

is full speed

on horseback

that is how it is

meeting you like this

# ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I offer my thanks to all those who have read, critiqued, and encouraged me during the time of this writing, including my own students, and especially Ann Hooke, whose marked-up pages and questions on the original manuscripts were most encouraging of all—because I was given a sense of the immediate relevance of what I was writing. And in particular, to Joseph Rubano; Squidge Liljeblad Davis, who has also been one of my essential bridges to the unseens; and Albert LaChance. It was in previous correspondence with Albert that I was newly empowered by the pleasure and freedom of translating what was most important to me into writing.

To all who have given to me in this lifetime and, equally, to those kind enough to take from me: you have all made this life possible.

And I especially acknowledge and thank Bettina Dudley, angel of emptiness, who has been dedicated to this book from the beginning, faithfully typing every page and every revision, and never flagging in enthusiasm. If not for her generous and tireless (and forgiving) friendship, and her overall support for the work I do, I might already be living a prematurely peaceful and unproductive life.

# CONTENTS

PREFACE

THE DHARMA AS POETRY

Part One

the drifter

Morning Chill

Frenchman's Bay

Another Morning Song

prayer flags in winter

Thinking, not thinking

Good News

six wild geese

The Prajnaparamita in Eight Lines

Heart Sutra

beyond sky and no sky

Whitman's Truth

Nothing Knows

quantum mechanics

A Step Ahead of the Present

Along the Piscataquog

The Missing Monk

through the cracks in my roof

the mind is autumn

Sext

Understanding Tom Bombadil

There Is No Woman

you think your future

Already happened

Part Two

Benediction

The Song That Is Before

Go to the Limit

Just Sitting

If He Is True

Make No Mistake

Just as I Lift

the nothing at the heart of the world

Ho!

the old tree

we are here to transmit virtue

The Congo Women

I Want This Delight for You

When I first saw my face

Simple Prayer

Epitaph

cosmology

Not the Next Moment

When the Poet's Eyes

I Guess I'm Lucky

Here in the Ati

Dawn on Martha's Ridge

early spring

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

# PREFACE

This book is first and foremost a book of poetry. By poetry I mean that play—that idiosyncratic dance—with what is fundamentally inexpressible, but which leaves us mysteriously revived and encouraged about the uncertain prospects for our existence here, for it gives air to the wild part of the soul, which is itself poetry, and which may be otherwise suffocating with the presumed literalness of our condition.

The book began as an evening presentation a few years ago, in which I gathered together several poems as the basis for a dharma talk. These grew into a small selection of poems entitled _Not by Knowing,_ which in turn grew into this book. As I set out to write a commentary for each poem, I would sometimes find myself writing instead a commentary for a poem not yet in the collection. And so this book guided me in its growth, and it has been a pleasurable friendship.

The particular poems gathered here have been borrowed, or conscripted, from many periods of my writing, expressly to be offered as a sacrifice to the greater whole that this book is intended to be. Ultimately, it emerged for me as one long poem utilizing both prose and poetry. It is not interested in philosophy as such; but when it becomes philosophical, or even academic in places, it is only intended to be in service to the greater poem. This is a multi-course dinner. There is food here for the intellectual mind; there is food here for the poetic mind; there is food here for no mind. Thus, though some commentaries are dense and some are light, there is some dialogue and, I hope, fresh air blowing between them. No commentary stands entirely alone, just as one side of a paradox is deceptive if it stands alone. They are meant to carry weight for one another.

A poem is like one half of a torn treasure map, meant to be completed in the reader's mind. There is no need to shortchange that relationship. I recommend that you approach the poems first and take some time to make their acquaintance on their own terms—or on _your_ own terms. Then you will have something of your own authority, and your own space of mystery, to bring to the commentary, which, after all, is only the author's half of the dialogue. When you do arrive at a commentary, I hope you will be able to experience it as an extension of that same jagged line, that mysterious half of the treasure map; one that adds new clues and new value to the complex (or deceptively simple) code that speaks through the poem. When you do return to the poem again—and I hope you will—it may echo that much more.

The poems and commentaries are deliberately sequenced, and so, as parts of a greater poem, they are intended, and may most profitably be read, in the presented order; especially since some of the later commentaries make references, or repeat ideas or phrases without explanation, in allusion to earlier commentaries. (That being said, I will not be surprised to see people turning to chapters randomly, by inclination, or even opening the book blindly in the fashion of an oracle.) The poems are ultimately proclamations of "good news." As such, they are basically the same good news. The commentaries wish to be poetic extensions or play upon that same good news. And, as each commentary arose as the spontaneous response to its poem, the news frequently repeats and overlaps.

There is _something_ wanting to be conveyed here. It is conveyed directly, in part, I hope, through the use of words spoken with some clarity. It is conveyed indirectly, in part, in the integrated whole or the overall impression made by the book. There is a repetitive theme running through all the poems and commentaries, and I hope they will each lend support to one another; although some may go down easy and some will take more work and slow digestion, your mind needn't struggle too long with one that remains less approachable. Just as with a crossword puzzle, you only linger so long on one word until you allow other words to help fill in the gaps and make the earlier ideas more clear. Or, on the other hand, you might feel free to take the time to walk with me slowly up the twisting mountain trail of some of the steeper commentaries, and not be discouraged by the occasional thicket, the narrow rock ledge, the need to slow down and assess the landscape, one sentence at a time, as the author must have done, lingering or rerouting as needed, not glancing by but giving the terrain time to be assimilated, time to do its work on us. Either way, a whole may begin to assemble itself, perhaps even subliminally. I'd like that.

I first encountered zen at the age of sixteen and began a dedicated zen practice at eighteen. That was in 1965. So the language in this book largely reflects a lifetime engaged with Buddhism; and the book did, after all, sprout from an evening of Buddhist teaching. My own nature naturally tends to the subtlest teachings found in the Chinese zen and Tibetan _dzogchen_ traditions. Given their depth and directness of insight, their precise and unadorned phenomenological languaging, their spontaneous embodiment, and their ability and willingness to point beyond themselves, it is easy for me to embrace these teachings as the most clear, true, and liberating articulation available of the nature of reality.

Yet that itself can prove a Buddhist occupational hazard, or blind spot. For like any language, like any teaching, it too can plant a subtle or separative mythology or fixity in our minds, the very opposite of what is intended. Even its very subtleness or simplicity can be turned into a prejudicial structure of thought or point of view that suggests: _This_ is how to speak of reality. While, in fact, no language has a corner on reality. A seemingly more relativistic, dualistic, or overtly mythic language may in fact have the same truth value or _functional value_ when lived in its immediacy. The subtle teaching is to be had only in the _living out_ of any language—and the living out beyond the language—whatever the tradition. Otherwise, we can miss the subtlety of truth to be found in any tradition or any language beyond our own.

So Buddhist teaching understands that language itself is not the truth. Precision itself is not the truth. Clarity itself is not the truth. Buddhism itself is not the truth. Precision and clarity must be tempered with paradox, poetry, imprecision, contradiction, and silence—if we are to make a complete offering of ourselves into the true Unknowing. I would dare say that all attempts throughout all spiritual traditions to portray or embody the undefinable truth, however lofty or subtle the language, inevitably add up to no more and no less than: Poetry. The distance between the unnamable Real and its expression as all that we experience is poetry; many poetries. As that truth has distributed itself through every possible poetry, the _total Poetry of the world_ best adds up to that truth. And the living traditions—how we live our lives or practice our spirituality—are _embodied poetry._ Whatever our own acquired or innate poetic sense, there may still be another poetry needed to do full poetic justice to the way things are, or to complete our own spirit song. (I explore all this more fully in the commentary to the poem "When the Poet's Eyes.")

Each poetry may take us very deep indeed into its own integrity. And yet it may be, as my friend Albert LaChance has said, that "One cannot hope to be spiritually literate simply by knowing _one_ of the languages of the Divine." Every language—Chinese, Yiddish, Aramaic, Mayan, or !Kung—offers its own wisdom, has its own unique genius for interpreting and revealing the subtleties of experience (which is why the loss of any language is the loss of a great human resource gained over millennia). So our languages of the spirit also need one another if we are not to remain stuck within our own self-centered and presumptuous "wisdom-domains," as if any other language could negate our own rather than enrich it. We needn't fear to keep all our language windows open to that undefinable and unownable reality that Buddhists may refer to as _prajnaparamita._ Or, as Thich Nhat Hanh might say, my Buddhism is made up entirely of non-Buddhism. So this book is a bit of a spiritual mongrel, not concerned with pedigree, Buddhist or otherwise. No one poetry is meant to be deified. The more the book expanded, the more freely it reflected the cross-pollinating influences and contradictory poetries in my own life.

The most recent of the many gifts of cross-pollination have come to me through the teachings of Martín Prechtel, Mayan shaman, praise-singer, storyteller, world teacher, and plumed serpent of cultural deconstruction and renewal; whose delicious pollen, carrying the DNA of the most ancient of trees, slowly drifted northward along hazy moonlit paths until called out to by my own DNA, waiting to complete the spirit song in my own bones; and whose delicious and life-giving impact in my life settled over everything like dust after a volcanic explosion. In its wake, the ecstasy of being and the grief of the world have taken one step more into the living embrace that upholds all life.

As this book began sprouting soon after I had completed four years of study with Martín, that dust is evident in this writing, gradually seeping through the cracks or sometimes full-blown. At first inspection, the influence of my studies with Martín on the greater contents of this book are minimal, as the book arises from older and deeper auto-biographical, experiential, and intellectual bedrock. But their influence on the one writing the book was substantial. Though the meat of it has been simmering a long time, the final soup is differently flavored than it would have been five years earlier. And so, ironically and fittingly, this roughly "Buddhist" poem serves also as a marker in my life of this special period of cross-pollination.

Martín's voice wells from the oceanic depth of indigenous understanding and practice, of which I can begin to appreciate only the surface currents, growing up as we all have within the machinery of a civilization that has been distancing itself from that voice for thousands of years. But it begins to add a resonant dimension to my own understanding (and hopefully to my life). Perhaps it is fairest to say that each new voice and point of view at least makes us more aware of what we routinely miss, and can no longer afford not to include. Thus I wish to clearly acknowledge my debt to Martín in this preface; and to briefly encapsulate here the growing synthesis in my awareness that allowed Martín's profound indigenous perspective to imbue and enrich my (albeit already mongrel) Buddhist perspective. But at no point herein am I presuming to speak for Martín, who is a unique voice, and whose next word always deliciously pulls the rug out from under my own limited understanding. How it displays itself in the book is subject to all my own limitations, but I pray Martín won't altogether reject the bastard.

One widening of perspective I received from Martín is that Buddhist teaching, for all of its subtlety and universality, is also, on one level, an Indo-European medicine for a particularly Indo-European malaise: the sundering of being and non-being, is and isn't, that is built into our very languaging. It is a poetry to cure a poetry. But there are also indigenous poetries in which the metaphors of language leave no stark dualities, but only multiple avenues of relationship and participation. The divine is neither a singularity nor a trinity, but a family. We are at home. And if we learn to live a "family life" in a cosmos in which everything is alive, and celebrate and honor the vertically and horizontally interconnected landscape and language of home, it is hardly a sign of a naive ontology, but of a deeply intact and integrative poetic relationship to the underlying truth.

Thus, in this understanding, our human existence, midst all the travails and traumas of worldly life, is a remembrance and celebration of origins; and a dance of mutuality in which all our human endeavors, our economics and our art, the very eloquence of our soul in its capacity for praise and for grief, are all seen as a continuous gift to the gods, who desire this eloquence of us even as they offer themselves to us in the form of every living thing arising in this world. The world, then, is the very embodiment of the gods, the multifarious conscious and creative energies of the divine. And our human activity is a remembrance and honoring of primary relationship. This mythically and ritually expressed relationship may be as sophisticated in its import as—and more embodied than—our rationally expressed metaphysics, theology, or quantum physics, which are equally myths of another, more objectified, level of languaging.

This mythic, or integrative, reality underlies the sacred everyday life of the human community in intact indigenous culture, Martín would argue. It is intact by virtue of the mutual dependence and mutual nurturance of that which is visible and that which is invisible, and by the mutual nourishment of moments of time—past, present, future, all expressed in our sustained relationship to the land. All human activity spirals back to the divine. In this sense there is no separate agenda, no private plan for seeking our own salvation or triumph, economic or psychological. Our individuality finds expression through our _participation_ in the natural diversity of life, uniquely creating beauty—through our emotional, linguistic, artistic, and economic activity—as a gift to be offered back to the Invisible that sustains us (and that, ultimately, we are not other than).

Modern political/economic culture suffers the degenerative effect of the extreme opposite impulse: an alienation from our Source and from our Commonality so profound that we seek to _privatize_ the living universe and the living earth, and even secure personal patents on God's (!) creations just because we noticed them. At this extreme, nothing is done for the gods—the living energies of creation—for the planet or for our fellow human beings, but only for selfish aggrandizement and the most narrow definition of profit or progress. It is a spiritual depravity truly worthy of being called a "dark age," and an apparent tragedy for the earth.

It is revealing to try to trace the source of this dysfunction historically or politically; yet, in the end, its spiritual roots go deeper. We find a most intimate metaphysical expression of intactness and its loss at the subtlest level of Buddhist thought and realization, such as in the Tibetan dzogchen teachings. Dzogchen is supremely nondualistic (we might say non-imperialistic) in that it does not call for manipulation or purification of the manifest world, but rather the recognition that it has never left its source. For all structures of consciousness, all phenomena, are not _other_ than the clear, empty, infinite, and present "mother-ground" of being.

The identity of manifest forms and essential emptiness, or spaciousness, is the dance of mutuality and reciprocity at the most subtle and paradoxical level; and an ever-fluid expression of that which is unbounded and inexpressible, beyond the fixations of the mind. We exist as a fundamental openness, not as a fundamental closedness. To share in that realization is also the essential remembrance and celebration of our origins, and the abiding in that intactness in which the visible and the invisible, the "holy" and the "human," also do not have separate agendas or realities, but continually nourish or _mother_ each other so that that "third thing," which we call life—the field of creativity and compassion—may flourish.

The fundamental "neurosis" that appears to drive our personal lives—as it drives history—is the illusion of separateness from the essential and indigenous ground of our own being. As Buddhist psychology expresses it, the manas principle, or ego-mind, arises out of the continuous field of being, and, under delusion of separateness, "reflects back" and encircles and identifies with a portion of the field, saying "this is me alone." This is the primal ignorance that drives us—that, never having left our source, our motherground, we nevertheless imagine ourselves as threatened, isolated selves to be defended and expanded. This is the primal tribalism or nationalism, we might say, first at the level of the psyche, born of uprootedness from the living field, the living ground of our being. This psychic impulse is largely addressed and modified by the deep psychologies of myth and ritual in intact indigenous cultures. But it is mirrored and played out by a culture in which that mature intactness has been uprooted. When that spiritual or cultural uprootedness prevails, we no longer exist to bless and feed reality (hence the earth), the indigenous ground of being in which we all participate; but rather we exist to exploit and mine reality (hence the earth) of its blessings—in an imperial project of self-aggrandizement born of spiritual poverty—the poverty of not knowing who we are.

This is the imperial drama we see being played out across the globe at this time, as it has always been played out—now only in its latest incarnation. This is the impulse that compulsively mines and despoils the earth, and that freely exploits other humans and all life forms, driving our corporate, political, and commercial culture with a voracious fear, greed, and ignorance. It is the impulse that endlessly fascinates us with the most material standards and ambitions for human technological cleverness, dominance, indulgence, and immortality. As Martín has taught, the mounting debt accrued by our imperial hubris—our refusal and inability to feed the holy while taking for ourselves—combined with the suppressed and "un-metabolized" grief of one historical tragedy after another, leaving us in flight from our real experience and uprooted from the earth—leads to a vast depression, a vast hole that we seek to fill with still more addictive exploitation of others and mining of the natural world. (I explore this a bit differently in the commentary on the poem _There Is No Woman_.) Thus, culturally as well as personally, our spiritual healing will also be a healing of our relationship to the earth.

My study with Martín, which revealed infinite epiphanies of interconnectedness, has helped me to more fully appreciate the immensity and the spiritual depth and coherence to be found in the fertile indigenous root life of this planet and its deep human history and culture—the recollection of which dispels the childish elitism and myopic forgetfulness of the modern world. It has also helped me to notice my own subtle "Buddhist" attachment to "no-story"; whereas the vast, infinitely expressive life of this planet, its beings and its peoples, its seed and water cycles, is itself a completely intimate and congruent expression of that transcendental and embodied wisdom that is ever willing to be expressed as story. (I discuss this further in the commentary on _If He Is True._ )

Stories are our thread of connectedness that sew together our human experience of time and place. Just as we must remember our starry selves, our timeless and placeless selves, so too, as time and place beings, we must honor the stories that foster our indigenous humanity, preserving our time and place lives on the land in a way that allows us to recognize and serve the integrity of our organic cycles with the earth.

At the heart of the Buddhist articulation of reality is that playful paradox that, at its exquisite and most nuanced peak of understanding, outshines fixation with any possible outlook, mental structure, or story. This transcendence of fixation is not a transcendence of our engagement with phenomena, of our appreciation of everything "as it is," nor even of our appreciation of the realm of Story. It is simply a seeing-through of the mind's tendency to give priority to the reified and _fixed meanings_ it attaches to the _data_ of its experience, while it overlooks the unconditioned nature of its own bright, generous, and spontaneous intelligence—what might be called its Buddha nature. That intelligence, when not circumscribed, leaves us always open to life as it reveals itself. And stories themselves (and the earth itself) are the rich play of life; a rich source of teaching. And so any story, any languaging, any poetry may arise—as it is said of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion—taking whatever form is of service to our well-being and to our unfolding awareness.

Traditionally there are stories that carry organizing truths that give cultural support to a people's affirmative engagement with life, with the land, with the holy, and with their origins; as well as stories that carry truths about the psyche. There is also a dimension of profound and innocent seeing in which all stories are dropped, or superseded. _Story_ and _no-story_ address two levels of the mind's capacity for integration with reality. When the mind is able to develop its mature flexibility of function, our engagement with _story,_ or myth, is able to admit a genuine and innocent intimacy with _no-story,_ with the simple or naked present; _even if this encounter is incorporated back into the story._ Conversely, our engagement with _no-story_ is able to appreciate and affirm the sacred container of _story_ in our lives; _even if that story is seen in the light of no-story._

Unless this mutually flexible and mature capacity exists—which derives from the inclusive spaciousness of wisdom and love—then either our engagement with story or our engagement with no-story can become fundamentalist—and a potential instrument of domination or violence. This occurs when our stories become traumatically and fundamentally stuck on themselves, and thus become exclusive and controlling rather than life-giving. Or when no-story itself becomes unwittingly a subtle story, which hence becomes antagonistic or suppressive of other stories.

I was deeply impressed long ago by an experience recorded by the anthropologist Colin Turnbull, who lived among the BaMbuti of the Ituri forest in the Congo. The BaMbuti experienced the forest as their all-protective mother; and if misfortune occurred, they assumed it was because the mother was sleeping. So on these occasions they would play upon the sacred _molima,_ a didgeridoo-type instrument that was meant to awaken the forest. This was the province of the men. The molima was kept in hiding and was taboo to women and children, who had to stay in their huts while it was being played. Turnbull faithfully noted all of this down.

But one morning he was awakened by the sound of the molima all through the village, along with the raucous cries and laughter of women and children. He looked outside and found them dancing playfully with the molima, making sweet music to the forest. _This_ story had not been stuck on itself. The taboo had been part of a play. The relationship to mother-being, to the affirmation of life, was freely in the hands of the feminine and of the child after all.

It is, however, easy for our human minds to be seduced, and for our human hearts to be traumatized, out of the realm of our original and vital affirmation of life and into the realm of beliefs, doctrines, and identities; out of our native fluidity and permeability to life, and into fixation with concepts. This births the gap in our being that ultimately leads to and maintains violence, even if by neglect or default. But beyond our attachment to story or no-story, beyond our attachment to duality or nonduality, there is a natural and spontaneous way in which life simply expresses and affirms itself in us, as in a baby, which has nothing to do with the structures of belief. And it calls us back to itself whether we are sitting alone in a cave or dancing the sacred molima in the heart of the village.

I believe it is this aware innocence and spontaneity, naturally inclusive and compassionate without fixation, that is also the essential and functional teaching of Buddhism. It allows us to experience ourselves in wholeness as no other than the wholeness of _what already and simply is._ And this aware innocence lies not only in a detached knowing, but also in our acts of participation, prayer, and offerings that honor the mystery of the holy that feeds our lives, and in all our beautiful engagement with form. Thus, what I would call from the Buddhist standpoint "the fourth turning of the wheel"—a turning that, like the others, does not reject the earlier turnings, but that both includes and is implied in them—simply brings us back to "life" itself: that theater of love, of appearance and disappearance, that arises eternally and ignorantly from the flapping of the paired visible and invisible wings of the butterfly; an aspect of what Mayan spirituality, as I understand it from Martín, might call "the butterfly house."

The butterfly house is a big house. As big as the heart and the lungs, and as big as prajnaparamita itself. Hence there is in these writings a deliberate shifting and weaving of language that allows many voices to be heard and to invoke an interpenetrating resonance: the nontheistic and the theistic, the poly and the mono, the masculine and the feminine, the infinite and the foreground, the personal and the impersonal, the quasi-dual and the quasi-nondual ( _quasi_ because there's no such thing as either one), embodying each language wholeheartedly in the moment, but ultimately pointing to, and inviting surrender into, the simple awakeness, the living poetry and the delicious truth beyond the play and fixation of language and concepts. The Buddha, the gods, the Goddess, the Tao, Freud, quantum reality, the Green Man, the Holy Trinity, and the Fab Four are on good speaking terms with one another. All are the resonant bell of prajnaparamita. Reality is not precious. It welcomes contradiction. The absolute has nothing to fear from any relative engagement or expression. And the ordinary has nothing to fear from its own permeability to the Unknown. This is the interpenetrating dharma of freedom.

_Dharma_ is a Sanskrit word with many meanings and shades of meanings. In Buddhism it is best known as referring to the essential truth of things, as expounded in the Buddhist teachings. So Buddha preached the dharma; but, it is said, so do rocks and stones, rivers and trees, skunks and dragonflies. I had several decades of poems waiting to be published, but somehow this book (this poem) happened instead. I can only say that everything written herein is an expression of my own personal practice and direct experience. It is my dharma song to you, distilled from my presently sixty-five years. It took me by surprise. It fed me on the way out. I hope that it will feed you.

JANUARY 2012

# THE DHARMA AS POETRY

The Tao that can be told (we are told) is not the actual Tao. The God that can be told is not actually God. And the dharma that can be told is not the dharma. This is an underlying truth of the wisdom teachings of Buddhism, which builds in sufficient paradox to antidote our tireless (and tiresome) tendency to literalize. God, the dharma, the Tao is (See the word "is"? Look out for it) just that which cannot be captured or reduced to any of the mental or linguistic structures—however subtle or grand—through which we perceive and create the world. And in contemporary physics, even our science has been relieved of its literalness. The universe is not literal.

Literalism presumes to hand us the "real" as it is. We seem to want our spiritual, metaphysical, scientific, and religious doctrines or formulations, even when subtle, to assume the mantle and "dignity" of being literal. But there is not anything that is literally real. God is not literal, and as all of creation is not literal, God is clearly not a literalist. Whereas, that God is a poet is evident everywhere. The poetry honors the space in which we allow "the real" to continually evolve and manifest out of our reciprocal and uncalculated relationship to it. It is what blessedly allows for life, love, paradox and play, and freedom.

Moonlight is playing against the old rail fence. We only see the fence by its being illuminated. And we only see the light by what it illuminates, including our own retinas. What light _is,_ and what the fence _is,_ we will never know. But this occasion to sing in the moonlight is the dharma as poetry.

# Part One

# the drifter

the moonlight

leaning against the old

rail fence

acquires no fame

he drifts into

town

on the strains

of an old drinking

tune

and will slink

into morning unsung

as spilt paint

only a cricket

waked from the shadowed

grass

calls to his love

# Commentary: "the drifter"

Tonight the light is so bright through my window it quickens my heart. Just outside there is an intimate display that I am rarely awake for. It is the moonlight stretched out with ease against the old rail fence. It could be Tung-shan, Shams Tabriz, Tilopa, Lalleshvari, Byron Katie—any of these luminous ones, past and present—passing through my own backyard, pausing in the brightness. It is brightness itself. This drifter is intoxicated with his own light and the way it lights up the world. Who wouldn't be intoxicated on a night like this? In Sufi poetry wine or intoxication represents the delights of luminous reality. In Buddhist poetry the moonlight is our awakeness, or Buddha nature; the absolute truth that underlies—or enlightens—our relative experience of existence.

The absolute truth and our relative experience are not separate. In one zen poem, it is said, "The ordinary fits the absolute like a box and its lid"—no doubt a fine-crafted Chinese or Japanese box; not a hair can separate this perfect fit. Or how about as perfect a fit as this drunken crooner leaning against the old rail fence? Can you pry apart the fence from the moonlight that is falling upon it?

Who, then, is this radiant unknown calling me to my window? What is the radiant moonlight come to steal my heart away? This moonlight, this illumination, which is not separate from the world, but which is rarely given witness by the world, threads itself through our awareness with occasional moments of revelation, uplifting our lives with its hidden promise—even if only subliminally, as with the distant strains of an old drinking tune—but never quite getting front and center recognition. Never truly acquiring any fame in our worldly eyes, or in the eyes of the world.

For the Taoists, "fame" refers to whatever we strive for and rely on as an external or a worldly reassurance, reflection, or confirmation by others of our value, our power, or of our wholeness. It is what disperses our attention into the world, and seems to keep us going in the world. It is our own place in, our own collusion with, the externalizations of history. To seek affirmation is only natural. Yet, instead of seeking "fame," we are encouraged, as we mature, to fulfill our "destiny"—which is the rediscovery and expression of our own intrinsic nature—by shining the light of our spirit (our awareness) back onto our own essence. This is our intimate love affair, not for public consumption or recognition; and it allows our life to become at last a unique expression of our wholeness, rather than our restless search for it.

At the same time, we discover that our wholeness is not a one-sided or separate accomplishment, but an equally owned contract between the visible and the invisible, between "heaven and man," the Taoists say. Thus the Chinese shaman was often depicted as partially paralyzed except when possessed by the celestial spirit; for if we live only for the externalized world it is like seeing with one eye or walking with one leg. It is in the mutual call and response of heaven and earth, the mutual giving and receiving, that wholeness is continually renewed.

From our ordinary point of view we strive to acquire some fame, some respectability, some justification in the eyes of the world that will make our lives meaningful. Will we find that fame leaning on a fence in the moonlight? Alas, if we want respectability we'd best seek something reputable to do, not this moonlight tryst, this call and response, that adds nothing to the gross national product. This moonlight is just for lovers. It is our love affair with our intrinsic nature, our original and mutual wholeness, which connects us to the entirety of creation, the union of moonlight and fence in eternal serenade. It is easily co-opted or diverted by our attachment to respectability and fame, to worldly repute, and to personal ambition. And yet, for the one who is drunk in the moonlight, there is nothing, no fame, to acquire.

Even if this moonlight serenade is always available to us, even if the moon leans against this fence every night and sings its heart out, it seems there is no fame for drifters. He's not going to make it onto the city council, or into the Rotary Club news or Who's Who, or even into the entertainment section of the local newspaper. He will not add a jot to the scripture of any church or the curriculum of any school. Nor does he have a chance in the art world. Even if he paints the whole nighttime with his radiant presence, by morning there is just so much spilled paint; like a sand painting swept away and wholly unmarketable. And when the day's business resumes, there is not a word of him in the press. (EXTRA: RADIANCE FOUND TO BE THE EVER-PRESENT TRUTH!)

Still, some small creature hidden in the grass—maybe me—maybe you—maybe the soul, we might say—may chance to become awake in the beautiful moonlight and be inspired to call out to his love—perhaps an evocation of praise or longing—perhaps through the creation of something beautiful. Is it to the moonlight itself he calls? Is it to his lady love? The poem doesn't say. On a night like this it is all the same love.

And that is simply how it is.

# Morning Chill

Morning chill—

one sip of tea

is nectar.

this morning it hurt

to rise

but already it is sweet.

# Commentary: "Morning Chill"

1969. At 3:30 a.m. I rise in my little cabin. Not easily. I have slept maybe six hours. I dress and go outside to shovel snow off my car. I drive down the Maine winter roads to the zendo. There is no time to complain. Now it is 4:10 and I am sitting on my cushion at morning tea service. My body is settled cross-legged on the earth. The breath is finding its way with familiar regularity into and out of my body. Each sip of tea brings warmth and quiet blessing.

Out of the chaos of tired early-morning energies, the jumble of sensation and emotion, the crosscurrents of motivation and resistance, there is knit the integrated acceptance of this moment. There is just this. That is the nectar.

Every moment is just as this morning. We are rising out of the chaos of random energies, the dramas of grasping and resistance, into the simple availability and demand of this moment. Prior to the fulfillment of our desires, prior to the morning's deep sitting, prior to our own true awakeness, we allow ourselves that first sip of tea. We open to "just this." Already it is sweet.

# Frenchman's Bay

I cannot pull myself to bed this night,

watching the still play

of the moon

on Frenchman's Bay.

Let these mountains stand endlessly

without morning.

Great space does not contain the moonlight.

# Commentary: "Frenchman's Bay"

Ah, the moon again. I am fortunate to have lived much of my life on Mount Desert Island in Maine, where the only mountains on the Eastern seaboard meet the sea. But the most marvelous view is from across the bay, on the mainland, in Hancock or Sullivan, from where the mountains appear to rise out of the sea. That's where I was living, right on the shore, when I wrote this poem.

Tonight, as I sit on the bank, the moon illuminates the sea and the mountains and the vast panorama of space. I may take this as a feast of the senses, but it is at once more vast and more intimate than that. It is experience beneath the point at which all the senses meet, and suffuses outward into an awareness without center. It is infinitely still and expressive reality apprehended without mind, as if through the very pores of the body, or the very pores of the earth; a direct infusion that nourishes and sustains my life. It is food and breath itself. Of course, if my mind is restless for the things of the world, this may seem like a very sparse diet. But if I have learned to sit still long enough to allow light to enter the pores, then it is a complete meal.

As we learn to keep the awareness open and empty in stillness and relax our fixation on surface appearances, we are able to welcome the fullness of being of all phenomena rising out of the rich well of emptiness. It is perhaps not unlike nighttime photography. If the shutter remains open, then that which is not visible to our daytime eyes gradually accumulates in light, rising up out of nowhere to offer itself like a lover upon the photographic plate of our awareness—the very screen of our being. This is not flat-screen awareness. It is opening to an embrace that is wholly spacious and empty-armed. When the mind is empty, reality is empty—because we are projecting nothing upon it. Then a full mutual embrace is possible.

Let these mountains stand endlessly without morning! That is the cry of a lover; the affirmation of this wondrous reality, in which the mountains and I and the whole universe reach to the same root, without beginnings and endings. It is the realm in which we remain ever true to each other, in which these bones too will stand without morning.

But what is this talk? Isn't change, impermanence, the essence of the dharma? Nighttime will always become morning and morning will give birth to night again. Even these mountains will be gone in a flash, so to speak; and the moon will never remain full.

Perhaps underlying my enjoyment I harbor the subtle fear that it will all change. If I am only attached to the phenomenal mountains or water, or the bliss of this moment—if I say, "I like the moon this way, but not that way"—I am surely in trouble. If I am trying to hold my objective picture of the world in place, I will inevitably suffer its loss. My embrace must reach for something underlying, to "being" itself; to the intrinsic affirmation of "the way things are," where "my bones" and "these mountains" stand without morning. Here is our true refuge and true root.

The Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once restated the traditional Buddhist practice of "taking refuge in the buddha, dharma, and sangha" to mean, "I take refuge in _things as they are._ " That is easier to affirm sitting on a moonlit bank overlooking Frenchman's Bay. Harder to let that full moon of affirmation rise over the mountains of our daily circumstances, our restlessness, conflict, or preferences of the moment.

In Celtic lore the story is told that Fionn MacCumhaill challenged each of his band of warrior-heroes, the Fianna Finn, to name the most beautiful music in the world. "The cuckoo that calls from the highest branch," said his son Oisin. Ah, that is a good sound, said Fionn. "The ring of a spear on a shield," said another. Ah, that is a good sound, said Fionn. "The laugh of a gleeful girl," or "the sigh of a moved one," ventured others. And so it went, until they all asked Fionn, who replied: "The music of what's happening is the most beautiful music in the world."

There are so many lovely things, so many difficult things; but what is _happening_? When we open our pores to Being we realize that Being is "happening." Empty being is expressing itself as the underlying and pervasive experience of the moment. This "emptiness" is not sparse, is not bereft; it is essential fullness, harmony, _empty_ of all the qualities that make things separate, yet in diverse array. This is the music of what's happening. This is the music of our full and free engagement with life. This is the radiant moonlight that we may drink through the pores of our being, if we are willing to open them whatever the mental circumstance.

Great space does not contain this moonlight. Our Newtonian minds might look up at the sky and imagine the universe to be a vast container in which the moonlight exists. But space, in that sense, is just a structure of the mind; like time, one of the most basic structures. There is no "reality" that is a "container" of anything, nor does anything "contain" reality. We are always instinctively seeking to contain the mystery of our aliveness—the inconceivable nature of what this is—within the structures of our own thinking mind, objectifying our direct experience; as if this fundamental awake and empty reality—this inconceivability—could be contained or conceived as anything objective. But moonlight simply arises as moonlight; and that which arises spontaneously _as_ ourselves can never be known or contained by the mind.

Sitting here in the boundless moonlight, dropping all structures of thought, the universe itself is released of its objective or projected reality. There is only radiance. There is only moonlight. And we are nothing more or less.

# Another Morning Song

My master taught me to make

a good cup of coffee;

nice and strong

with two spoons of sugar.

If the white world looks white

while drinking by the window,

step outside and you

will see its true radiance.

Coffee and sugar, and

all the rivers of the world

are running within me.

Before the birth of space

there is no end to the snowfields

of the universe.

# Commentary: "Another Morning Song"

I rarely drink coffee. And I never use any sugar. But there was a time, when I was living and farming with my teacher, that I got into the habit of drinking coffee the way he did—nice and strong, with two spoons of sugar. We're not talking gourmet coffee or high ceremony here. A heaping teaspoon of instant, quickly mixed on the way out to the tractor, coffee cup in hand.

But coffee, of course, connotes awakeness. And sugar is sweet. And my teacher gave me the gift of that awakeness that is sweet.

At the time of this poem, I had been living alone a little while in a cabin in the woods. It was midwinter, and I was still taking my morning coffee the same way. Well, not so much sugar. There was a little clearing around the cabin and then the surrounding woods, and as I arose from my morning sitting the sun was dancing brilliantly off the snow, both on the ground and in the trees, with a blaze of whiteness. I was observing this through the window as I drank my coffee, but I recalled the many occasions I had stood outside in the snow and experienced the full radiance of the winter world.

It is one thing, I thought, to drink at the window; to look out at the world from my little point of view. Or I may have read about the wonders of snow or entertained various ideas about it; and it may seem very inviting. It is another thing to be standing out in the winter world, the immaculate panorama of dancing light, the cold, fresh vitality in the bones and against the skin, the crystal light hanging from every bough like billions of shimmering holograms of the same bright reality.

Just so, it is one thing to have a longing for "spiritual truth," or the memory of a glimpse of "reality," or any of our private ideas about it. But it is another thing to step outside all the structures of our thought and, as on a crisp winter morning, stand out in the full radiance of naked awareness, and in the enjoyment of that original light reflecting everywhere.

Here in that awake sweetness there is no containment, nor the conventional distinction of inside and outside. "All the rivers of the world are running within me." (Well, come to think of it, maybe that line was influenced by the coffee running in my veins.) But underlying that is a radiant emptiness that is one with all manifestation. All the rivers of the world—all the pathways of reality and all unknown ancestral wanderings—are simply at home in my body, which is the very body of the world.

Before the birth of space, before the arising of the first structure of thought, there is already no end to the snow fields of the universe, the timeless radiance. Great space does not contain the moonlight.

# prayer flags in winter

against the snow

and the barren trees,

the gentlest breeze

moves the prayer flags.

white, red, green,

blue—they lift their skirts

just a little—

their frayed edges hang

like threads of compassion

into the world.

the slow morning sun

lights up the snow

and a bright empty space

for the whisper

of their tender secrets

to bless the air.

# Commentary: "prayer flags in winter"

Prayer flags have been around a long time. Before their later Tibetan incarnation, the instinct to send out blessings and to feed the holy was already present in all the flags and fringes of early peoples and in the dance of leaves in the wind. Prayer flags are strung everywhere in Tibetan cultures and they are becoming more popular and familiar in the West. Their sequences of brightly dyed cloth—blue, white, red, yellow, green—hang down with printed blessings for health, wisdom, peace, and prosperity. Now a gentle breeze tosses their bottoms upward. But they may fly in the most severe of climates and the most barren of circumstances. They are an ever-present and gentle reminder of what lies at our heart. They are a testament and a celebration.

Each life is born into the world as part of an endless string of prayer flags. The heart is open as the radiance of pure blessing. But the heart may quickly come to experience itself as under siege. The need to defend overwhelms the capacity to bless. At best we end up with a frozen possibility, a winter compromise. But the sun of our true nature is always shining; even in the winter world. And so we must stay open to the winter sun; let the gentlest breeze stir us. Let the blessings in our hearts lift their skirts a little. Let the threads of our own struggle become the threads of our compassion.

In our vulnerability lies our great gift, our great potential. There is something venerable about our frayed edges; something quite capable of blessing. Let these frayed edges hang down into the world, dance in the wind; allow them to release more of our compassion. This is the passing world. Prayer flags will not unfray and recover their bright dyes, however much the world resists, denies, and pretends. Their tattered bodies will be burned and replaced; all that is left is their power to bless. That is the sum of a life.

On a morning like this it is all so simple. The sun shines on the barren trees. Our frayed edges hang down. A gentle breeze lifts them. The snow reflects. We all carry tender secrets—more tender than we know, and more capable of blessing. We needn't shut them away in endless hibernation, in endless retreat from a cold winter. We allow the slow morning sun at our hearts to gradually open up a place for them, so that the whispers of these secrets, the secrets of our true tenderness, may blossom with the possibility of true compassion.

# Thinking, not thinking

Thinking, not thinking, the same light shines.

Moods or their absence are the same wine.

No falling away and nothing to be fixed.

No form of turbulence disturbs the sea.

Illuminated shadows have no shape.

The moonlight has no quarrel with the moon.

Only completeness from the very start.

All paths, all dharmas, have already died.

Warmth and coolness play upon my skin.

Moonlight is laughing in the world of clouds.

# Commentary: "Thinking, not thinking"

When we first begin a meditation practice we may be motivated by a desire to bring peace to our restless minds. We may even have a desire for something called "liberation" or "enlightenment." And we may naturally judge the "success" of our meditation by our ability to "focus" or to still the mind. Our experience and judgment of "success" or "failure" in our meditation may become one more go-round of the restless mind; and our desire for enlightenment—even our desire to "meditate correctly"—may become one more picture or expectation or anxiety for the mind to fixate on.

Over years of practice the mind indeed becomes more stable and the ability to concentrate or to enter into stillness becomes natural. Nevertheless the mind is still capable of being quite active, and just as happy to seek all kinds of distractions. One morning I may sit down to profound stillness; another morning I may be no more than an unpaid babysitter for the antics of my mind in the playpen of the meditation cushion. The curious thing is that over the years it makes less difference. We discover that the growth in our meditation practice is characterized not always, or necessarily, by the absence of mental activity, but by its insubstantiality. That while the shadow-dance of the mind continues, there is another light of presence, another light of being, that continues to shine through and is never really diminished, even by distraction. And that thinking and not thinking are both creatures of that same light. The distinction of thinking or not thinking, or good or bad meditations, even of meditation or not meditation, melts away.

By that same token, moods and emotional states are experienced as ripples in the dance of one same energy; or as various bouquets arising from one same wine. And we become better able to simply taste the wine and disregard the various labels that come printed on the bottles. The idea that one state or another takes us closer to, or farther away from, some imagined goal, or constitutes a falling away from some ideal state that thus needs to be restored or repaired, also becomes increasingly obsolete. We more easily perceive and abide in the ocean of being itself, and are less troubled that any form of turbulence could truly disturb the nature of the ocean.

Before we begin to practice, we naturally give reality and authority to our thoughts, as if they were independent and commanding entities that could define our reality for us. But as we simply allow the light of our empty awareness, or awakeness, to shine, thoughts lose all shape and substance, or any defining authority over our awareness. If you shine a light on a shadow to see it more clearly, there's no shadow at all.

We may begin to perceive, in fact, that thoughts are simply a play of the emptiness itself—just another radiant arising of the original light of our awareness, like a rainbow produced by the refraction of light, playful and ungraspable. There is no separation and no quarrel between the absolute source and its relative manifestation. As the quarrel dies out even the notion of a distinction between source and manifestation vanishes. Path, separation, union, dharma die away from our conceptual schemas. We are the one complete wordless reality. "Marvelous, marvelous," it laughs at itself through the eyes of zen sages.

Who is there either to be lost in form or to be caught in a one-sided image of absolute or transcendent emptiness? That so-called emptiness is none other than the actual relative world of our every moment experience; the familiar world of opposites, of hot and cold playing on our skin. This cloudy night sky is shot through with the laughter of moonlight.

# Good News

Disregarding dreams,

Transparency is working

Even when we're thick.

This is like sunlight

Filtering through a lead room

As if it were glass.

Then only the lead

Believes in its heaviness

While the worlds rejoice.

It lives the perfect

Principle of nothingness

In which it rests,

Creating its dreams

Of lead in a river of

Shining emptiness

No wonder the sun

Shines anyway. The grass is green.

It has always been

Transparently the

Same. That day we are awake

To our beginning.

# Commentary: "Good News"

Disregarding dreams, the one same light, the one same transparency, is still the case. Only our attention is turned from it, and so preoccupied with giving solidity to a world of thought forms that we naturally get a little thick. As in the idiom, "He's a little thick." Meaning he doesn't see what's right in front of him.

Our thoughts are as natural as anything. They are just part of the natural radiance of that transparency itself. But our consciousness has the capacity to be hypnotized by their creative playfulness, so entranced or identified with the worlds they create—the seemingly concrete "worlds of lead"—that we don't notice the light shining through. And our thoughts may take us into the suffering world of separateness, isolation, desire, and conflict. How is it that the joy-of-being can dream suffering? This is perhaps the most ancient koan. The Buddha's great revelation was that all things are inherently pure as what they are, transparent and enlightened from the very beginning. We already live that perfect fact of no-thing-ness: there are no separate concrete things fixed unto themselves, distinct or isolated or other than the transparency of the whole, perfectly radiating, manifesting, and displayed as all things out of the shining emptiness.

It is not the world that is illusion. The world is a radiant arising. It is only the tendency of the mind to project and fixate that causes us to see it in illusory terms. It takes only a little relaxation of the mind's fixation—its enchantment with spinning dreams of lead—to awaken to what has been here from the beginning. Can you imagine if the sunlight or the grass growing was dependent in this moment on your state of mind? That would truly be a disaster. Can you imagine if the perfectly penetrating and transparent radiance of the original pure light of being was itself dependent on our state of mind? Fortunately, it is not. I thought that was pretty good news.

# six wild geese

Six wild geese

fly by.

Not a cloud.

# Commentary: "six wild geese"

Innocent enough. Six wild geese did fly by. But what are these six wild geese? They are the senses—if we include mind perception as the sixth sense, as Buddhists do.

The sense worlds fly by, and they are wholly insubstantial. They leave no track on the cloudless sky of awareness—until discursive thought arises to structure sense impressions into imaginary worlds and invest them with ultimate reality. Then things appear a bit cloudy. Then we get tangled in our own web.

But the senses themselves are wild and marvelous. Let them fly by freely in a cloudless sky.

# The Prajnaparamita in Eight Lines

The way things are

is what there is.

The way things are

is what is meditating.

The way things are

sometimes likes to say "I."

But "I" is only

the way things are.

Neither holding nor rejecting "I,"

who can know the way things are?

The way things are

is not a way.

The way things are

is not a thing.

The way things are

is what there is.

# Commentary: "The Prajnaparamita in Eight Lines"

The way things are is what there is. That sounds pretty self-evident. Almost a truism. But wait a minute. Isn't that exactly what our minds don't accept as true? Somehow we need to wedge a little space in there—between "the ways things are" and "what there is"—for the realm of the way things _should_ be, the way I _need_ them to be, the realm of being that is subject to my approval or disapproval. This opens up a vast _virtual_ realm in which we lead our lives, consciously or unconsciously: the realm of judgment and desire, the realm of "the way things aren't, but should be."

But isn't even this realm of resisting and wanting and judging also part of the way things are? Absolutely. Which is why it might be said that it's all perfect, really, from the absolute point of view. But the point is: it's not perfect for us. We suffer. The imaginary distance that we place between "the way things are" and "what there is"—and then somehow manage to insert ourselves into the middle of—opens a seemingly wide arena of suffering. That's the first truth taught by the Buddha. The Buddha's teaching doesn't begin with logic or philosophy. It begins with the ache in our gut and proceeds from there.

And the second truth is that this suffering proceeds from the activity of desire and grasping, forcing or resisting, owing to our ignorance of the fundamental perfection of the way things are, which we could call the Buddha Nature, or the Tao. And the fundamental experiences that arise from this grasping and resisting—greed, anger, inertia, restlessness, and doubt—are understood as compulsive mind states that distract us from ever rediscovering the actual nature of things.

The Prajnaparamita scriptures are said to reflect the second period, or _turning,_ of Buddha's teaching. _Prajnaparamita_ translates roughly as "transcendental wisdom," or "the wisdom that has gone beyond." The scriptures are written in a language that is largely paradoxical, because what this transcendental wisdom has "gone beyond" is the stuckness and limitation of our everyday concepts and mental categories. They are calling us back to, or invoking, the absolute nature of the way things are.

We might think of prajnaparamita—transcendent wisdom that sees all things and beings as empty of any independent existence—as a remote or sublime detachment. But it is in fact the greatest intimacy. For here, in the reality of prajnaparamita, there is nothing, no objectification, to keep us separated from our experience. Nothing to keep us separated from the objects of our experience. No one or anything to be separated. We are siblings arising every moment out of the same body of emptiness, Mother Prajnaparamita, The-way-things-are-is-what-there-is. Compassion arises naturally as a family affair; or, even more intimately, as the heart of one same body. Thus, the prajnaparamita literature is imbued throughout with two great themes, paradoxical to our conventional minds: the emptiness and insubstantiality of everything, and universal love, manifesting in the selfless perfections of generosity, compassion, patience, commitment, meditation, and insight.

Dogen Zenji, a great Japanese zen master, says, "The sounds of the boatmen rising from the river are my Beloved little Shakya"—his endearment name for Shakyamuni Buddha, or Buddha Nature itself. Brother sun, sister moon; comfort and discomfort; hot and cold—are these not also our beloved little Shakya?

There is an old zen recounting of the master and his disciple sitting together in the summer heat of southern China. The disciple observed: "In this region the summers are brutally hot, the winters unbearably cold." His teacher replied, "Why don't you go to that place where there is no hot or cold?" The student asked, "Where is that place where there is no hot or cold?" And the master replied, "In the summer, we sweat. In the winter, we shiver." Here the master has intimately expressed the inseparable relative and absolute in one stroke.

Certainly in the summer we will sweat. And in the winter we will shiver. And we are also free to do the things that are done in response to that. We step into the shade. We fan ourselves. Or we find a warmer coat or build a fire. That is the simple realm of how things are. But once we _seize_ on the words "hot" or "cold," that opens the door to _too_ hot or _too_ cold, the realm of our subjective approval or disapproval; the realm of attachment to our projections; the realm of suffering. If our responses and actions arise from the _full embrace_ of the way things are, we achieve our freedom. Putting on a coat is a free and loving act. If we inwardly _resist_ the way things are as the basis for our action ("Goddamn it, it's too cold around here"), we achieve only more suffering.

The teacher is kindly inviting his disciple back out of the tyranny of his objective categories, the separative activities of his mind, and his suffering. At the same time he is inviting him back into the infinite, intimate, ungraspable dimension of the way things are, here and now, beyond the mind's projections and the mind's stories. The way things are is already prajnaparamita—the wisdom, or truth, that is beyond the realm of all our concepts and all our suffering. The very ground of our awareness is not other than prajnaparamita; not other than the way things are. It is the naked surrender, or offering, of our awareness, in simple openness to the way things are, that actualizes Buddha's third and fourth noble truth: liberation.

I can still subject myself to the mental tyranny of hot and cold. But not on the occasion of writing this poem. That imaginary distance vanished, along with the imaginary me. I was like the man in the ancient fable who, wandering in the woods, comes upon an undiscovered race of people who are entirely happy and entirely at peace—although once he returned to his daily life he was never able to find his way back. Fortunately, the way back is given to us by such generous teachers as each sound that falls upon our hearing when we are just listening.

This poem is really an invitation to investigation. Taking the first line, "The way things are is what there is," I might tell you as a student, "Go home and take a week, and see if you can find any exception to this, and come back and let me know. But remember to include everything!" You're sure to end up with a smile on your face. Why? Because in the process, the nagging unconscious distinction between "what is" and "what ought to be" melts away. Or regarding the second line, "The way things are is what is meditating," I might ask, "See if you can find anyone other than that." And the nagging distinction between "ourselves" and "what is" melts away.

Strictly speaking, however, we are not normally capable of such an investigation. To be able to investigate truly we must "employ" a naked awareness that is not lost in images or abstractions. Normally we live within just such a realm of images and abstractions and shuffle them around and come to new conclusions that are just new images and abstractions. But in truth, we have no actual or direct experience of what we are thinking or talking about. This is the dream world—the world of delusion—we all inhabit. We casually speak of "me," "you," "the mind," and all the content of our feelings and beliefs as if they were real experiences, as if they were more than reifications and images that refer to no independent, fixed, or concrete reality.

Do we know what a "me" is? "Me" is a complex of images and assumptions that build and build; that we identify with and live with daily. But what does it actually refer to? To truly investigate this, the mind must be still for a while. Awareness must function.

Let's just sit—until we can distinguish the animated cartoon of our mental activity from the clear, steady light of the bulb of awareness that projects the images upon the screen. Until there is just that natural ground of awareness illuminating all phenomena. Until even the idea of restlessness, the sensations of restlessness, and all our reactions to the ideas and the sensations, are just so many more leaves stirring in the wind. Until the play of light and shadow in the room is no different than the sensation of your backside on the cushion, the subterranean call of the ache in your back or the thing you left undone. Now the secret joys and generosity of the breath, now the bird call, now the sound of the rain, the call of wood and carpet and the geometric array of forms, the movement of thought or desire or subtle trepidation, the thought "I," all empty into the common fabric of the way things are, ungraspable, all as expression of the one ground of being, which is both and neither subjective nor objective, according to no fixed idea, not of light or dark, not even of being or non-being.

Only then may we discover whether or not this "I," this precious "I," this curious, creative, longing, and long-suffering "I," this I-hymn of creation, is anything other than "the way things are," which includes the capacity to say "I." Gone then is the need to attach to this I or to reject this I; nor indeed is there anyone to do it. Gone then is the need or the ability to "know" the way things are; nor is there anyone to know it.

Apart from the mind's projection, the way things are is not a way. "No suffering, no path, no attainment of wisdom," says the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra. The way things are is not a thing. "No realm of sight, taste, touch, consciousness," it says again. So even the phrase "what there is" must point beyond itself to a complete and inclusive emptiness or openness. This empty and open realm is the light of our own awareness. It is the complete availability to mystery, to radiance without contraction or separation, to unknowing awakeness, empty of projection, able to play in this moment.

# Heart Sutra

On November 22, 1994,

the author of this poem, riding

the N.Y. subway, clearly saw the emptiness

of all conditions. O Señorita,

form is no other than emptiness,

emptiness no other than form; your form

is exactly emptiness, and

emptiness always exists as form.

There is nothing that can be known

that isn't exactly this. Past &

future, time and space, aging and

death, the subway, the city, your Spanish

lips, all desire a dream within a

dream as we sit here with

compassionate indifference to that

which has never been and will

never die. It is 5:55,

2nd Ave. and Houston. At

Frutti di Mare my date arrives

45 minutes late. That's OK, I say.

There's no time like this time.

# Commentary: "Heart Sutra"

The Heart Sutra is one of the shortest sutras in the prajnaparamita literature. A pithy and paradoxical distillation, it reports that "the Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, while resting in prajnaparamita—transcendental wisdom—clearly saw the emptiness of all conditions. Oh, Sariputra," he says, addressing one of the Buddha's chief disciples, "form is no other than emptiness, and emptiness no other than form." It proceeds from there to systematically dismantle and negate all of the formal tenets of Buddhism as a way of affirming that truth which is beyond any doctrine or conceptions. Hey, these things happen!

This poem is also a straight and parallel report. It seems, in this case, that the author, while riding the New York subway, clearly saw the emptiness of all conditions. The "date" referred to at the end of the poem was, in fact, my cousin, whom I rarely see. And we had agreed to meet for dinner at a restaurant on the Lower East Side. As I sat on the subway heading downtown, resting peacefully at heart and open to the buzz of subway activity around me, the scene melted—or should I say " _being_ melted"—into what I never find better words for than "the great transparency"—being and non-being, form and emptiness, simply transparent to itself as one and the same. Any linguistic description can't help but imply a subtle distinction that is simply not so. Form _is_ emptiness. Emptiness is _exactly_ form.

This mysterious paradox is only an obscure conundrum to our conventional minds. But it is experienced as the simple reality when the mind is empty of even its subtle conceptualizing activity, an activity in which even the things in our immediate experience are apprehended through a veil of conceptual understanding. To our ordinary way of thinking and seeing, things exist by virtue of being defined as separate from anything else and from the whole, just as we see life itself as separate from death. Everything has an outer edge and a middle, so to speak. Hence it takes up space; and thus space is not empty. All the real estate has already been taken. Everything is a done deal, although the deal is only a creation of our minds.

When this subtle and fundamental conceptualization ceases, when awareness itself becomes empty, the world becomes empty. There _is_ no real estate. It is simply manifesting as it is, freshly in each moment. All is still present as it is, but _what it is_ is empty of any separative and defining meaning the mind may have projected. We are not defining reality by any arising structures in consciousness, the prajnaparamita sutras would say. Awareness is bright. All is known intimately not _as_ something; but as empty of any separative quality, a simple and pure expression of _Presence,_ here and now. And Presence is only another word for the experience. Marvelously, even our mind's most fundamental concept of "being" as separate from "non-being," of form as separate from emptiness, relaxes and becomes empty. This does not have to be thought of as a mystical or occult experience. It is simply what is recognized when the conceptualizing mind, for a short or longer period of time, takes a vacation.

Try this. Let your attentive gaze fall upon anything. A pair of glasses. An apple. A pen. A cup. Let your mind relax and simply sit present with it for a while. "Open" to it. You may notice first that the mind is still busy with other things. Your awareness is not simply resting with the object. Even as your mind relaxes further, and rests with the object, you may still hear yourself thinking such basic thoughts as "glasses," "rim," "used for seeing," "lying there." You are still knowing them as "glasses" in your perception. Let this knowing and naming quality of the mind continue to relax. Let "ignorance" or innocence arise even as you continue to rest your attentive gaze.

Let the presence of this less-and-less-known thing, arising in your awareness, swallow you up, so to speak, in its undefined "being." To a part of the mind it is a kind of dying—into an awareness in which even self and other, being and not being, and the names of objects cease to be categories in the mind. All is "empty," but present. You are still able to put your glasses on, or lift the cup, or write your name when the time comes. But your spontaneous interaction with the world is not dependent on the defining activity of your mind.

You may have noticed, if you sat with it for a moment, that the very idea—as well as the perception—of the _presence_ of an object "softens" the edges of our ideas about the object, and softens the literalness or absoluteness of its name and its defining outlines; so that we may shift from the defining mind to the receptive appreciation of "being," or presence. Paradoxically, this "softness" leaves us more open, more receptive, to the object itself as it now participates in our awareness, less defined but more present; more _empty of_ itself as we would define it, but more completely there _as_ itself. As we exchange a separative and defining capacity of the mind for a more inclusive quality of awareness, the very paradigm of our experience changes. Presence and definition emerge along two different scales of the mind's activity: the less defined, the more present. And the more present the more truly mysterious and luminous, participating in unqualified being.

Everything in fact is arising and dissolving in our _perception,_ no differently than a dream or an image or a thought arises and dissolves in perception. Perception itself is empty, as are its objects. That is, it has no solid reality, but merely offers itself for interpretation. Even the apparent solid appearance of banging my fist on a table is but the combined interpretation of insubstantial sense perceptions. Interpretation arises from habitual, practical, and conditioned associations of the mind and from private and agreed-upon cultural meanings. In accord with those, it is always reducing emptiness to form. As I attribute solidity, distance, separateness, and fixed definitions, concepts, and meanings to my perceptions, the world arises as solid, distant, alien, and temporal, and is defined by my attachment to concepts. When I relax the concept-making activity of the mind, and allow profound receptivity, the world arises as Presence, which is intimate, spacious, atemporal, and empty of attached meaning or projected form. And yet it may be said to allow for a new dimension of meaning.

The concept of a solid self also arises as a habitual interpretation of perceptions. The self can be experienced simply as a dimension of awareness-participating-in-being; or else the perception can be continually defined and refined in the conceptual mind as a separate and solid entity.

Just as a thought may be said to be insubstantial and occupy no space—yet if we are preoccupied with it, it is as if solid and takes up all space—so does the world of our perceptions, and of the self, arise spacious or unspacious, spontaneous or fixated, according to the nature of our preoccupations. Take as a metaphor the space of a room that is filled with boxes. Relatively speaking, the space of the room is "filled." The boxes take up all the space. Perhaps there is no room now for anything else. There is not even room for air. But the actual "space" of the room is in no way reduced. If our attention is preoccupied with the boxes, we may see it as "no space." But if we turn our attention to the space itself, we see it is the same—as spacious as ever.

When we relax our preoccupation and conditioned response, space reappears, and the arising world and the self does not interfere with, but expresses, the empty and awake fullness of being—Buddha nature. The empty fullness of being is the natural play of form and emptiness—mind, emotion, and world—that is free to manifest and disappear without binding effect on our true, original, or non-dwelling mind, as it is variously called. It is only the mind's activity of preoccupation and fixation that selects, chooses, and creates a substantial and separative drama out of the whole—a drama that appears to have a binding effect upon us. Samsara versus nirvana.

If the objects of perception are empty—if reality is a field of spaciousness and potentiality rather than a field of fixed truth—then our choice and our mature capacity to love are supremely potent, for they can shape the world of our experience. Our essential nature and our ultimate calling is to be the very occasion of love in this universe, from moment to moment, from arising to arising. This is _bodhicitta,_ enlightened heart—the heart of the awakened teaching of Jesus and of the entire Mahayana Buddhist canon.

The question of whether the "world" is "real" or "unreal" is not the true question. "Real," "unreal," and "world" are all concepts. The question is whether we relax and radiate within the field of presence and within the field of arising perceptions, expressing and affirming the unqualified nature of being, and caring for its manifestation in all others; or whether we engage in the activity of cognitive and affective contraction within that field—shrink in our awareness and in our feeling life—solidifying in our perception a world of separation, of self and other, of for and against, and of negativity. The question, that is—and the ultimate yogic practice—is whether or not we love.

Consider for a moment that we _are_ the universe, or the one mind, dreaming itself. When we as that one mind become lucid within the dream, releasing the fixation around the play of meanings we consciously and unconsciously assign to experience; when we relax our mental preoccupation with things—including the abiding mental preoccupation with the idea of self—and when we lovingly re-allow the natural spontaneity of the mystery of our lives and of all phenomena, we may experience that all appearance, like all thoughts, takes up no space at all; that all existence remains infinitely spacious or empty—already love! already liberated! already us!—even as it takes on appearance; even as we engage it, even as it is known—arising from one source in the play of consciousness.

This lucidness, this awakening to our essential nature, enables us to truly care for and support all life in all of its manifestations and to cherish the freedom and well-being of others. It enables our own _spacious_ capacity to be here for the _spaciousness_ of all appearance; and it enables a spontaneity of being that is free of the linkage—free of the causal patterns—of reactivity, separation, projection, and fear that qualifies our simple presence. It enables our experience of being at home in "existence," already having reincorporated and resolved back into our own consciousness the projections of nonexistence, and hence no longer living under the shadow of negation, the shadow of death.

This "being at home" arises in the moment as the simple and ordinary experience of being present for all things and allowing them to be present for us. This is the immediate aspect: all is simply what it is and speaks to us as such. But this presence may also be experienced as a window on an infinite reality that unfolds for us in the state of quiet, intimate receptivity or absorption, and that in the moment enwraps and enrapts the soul, the perceiving attention. In these moments we are shown what the universe looks like "from the inside"; when we are no longer being held "outside" by our projections. Its description in language requires paradox, for it is an emptiness infused with an infinite fullness that is both immediate and universal; a silent, empty expanse of being, a vast unruffled stillness that is _at the same time_ an all-inclusive joyful communion or epiphany—that might even be described as choruses of hosannas unto the highest.

The ancient zen master Keizan captures all of this beautifully when he says: "There is not a speck of dust for ten thousand miles. Where are clever officials and fierce generals now? There is only singing, singing. All is Great Peace from the very beginning." This naturally expresses as the upwelling of all-encompassing, unconditional love—because that is simply what we are—as well as the absence of normal or conventional human belief, attachment, meaning, reference, or urgency (all of the negations of the Heart Sutra). As for the "indifference" referred to in the poem, it isn't nihilism or lack of compassion. The compassion is intrinsic; but it is one with the clarity that there is no arising that is subject to death, that can suffer harm or consequence. All is already resting, both totally manifest and totally empty at this moment, undisturbed in "God's mind"; or, in the fundamental space of being.

Rising in timeless wonderment from my seat as the train stops at 2nd Avenue and Houston, I instinctively check the time on the subway clock: 5:55. Walking a few blocks, and finding a table in the crowded restaurant, I spend forty-five delicious and ecstatic minutes just sitting amidst the music of the surrounding table talk and clatter. When my cousin arrives, she is quick to apologize for being late, and I am equally quick to reassure her: there's no time like this time.

# beyond sky and no sky

the form

of the world

is my greatest

emptiness

its very

appearance is

the face

that feels its own

kisses

the space that

opens

within me

falls on its knees

before the

dawn

of all space

receives the

blessing

that all water

receives

in the midst of

all water

surrenders

as all sweetness

must in

the midst of all

sweetness

the vast

luminous absence

of all things,

empty beyond

sky

and no sky

peals with the laughter

of all things

I am the love-limb

of that absence

# Commentary: "beyond sky and no sky"

"The music of what's happening," says Fionn, "is the most beautiful music in the world." And the form of the world is my greatest emptiness. Read: my most beloved emptiness. My beloved Shakya. Its very existence delights in itself, even in its apparent duality. It is the face that feels its own kisses. No kiss leaves its lips, but it is immediately felt on its own cheek.

Tibetan Buddhism speaks of three skies merging: the "outer sky" of perception that we gaze out upon, infinitely spacious; the inward sky of mind awareness, the perceiver, also infinitely spacious; and the infinite sky that includes them both together as one sky. This is the space that opens within, bowing before the dawn of all space. Sky does not withhold itself from sky. Water does not withhold itself from water. Nor is sweetness separated from itself. Water need not beseech itself for the blessing of water. Its own quality pervades everywhere. Neither can sweetness separate from sweetness, but is already surrendered to itself. So does the emptiness of all-thing-ness, like a world of all water or all sweetness, already inhere in itself as its own blessing.

In a universe of all water, no water is seen to be present. Its total presence is its own absence. Its absence is its luminous potential. Its luminosity is its laughter. The absence of all things ever arises as the presence of all things, while being ever absent. It is neither sky nor no-sky. Its self-surrender and luminosity is love. We are the blessing of water for water. We are the surrender of all sweetness in sweetness.

Beyond any idea of separation or non-separation, this luminous absence is alive as presence. I am the love-limb, the very extension and body of that. I am your ambassador and minstrel. We _are_ the face that feels its own kisses. I call to you from what we are.

# Whitman's Truth

Whitman knew who he was.

One voice without a second.

He was beyond fear of

contradiction. He knew that his

most outrageous utterances

were no more outrageous

than the rush of a brook or a clap

of thunder. And that no law

kept him from speaking the

truth, which was in immediate

supply forever. And

while others diminished them-

selves, shrinking

from truth till it became a cage

to pray to, Whitman

filled out the full dimension

of his stride, knowing

truth as the swing of his arms

and the taste of supper.

No wonder he could sing.

# Commentary: "Whitman's Truth"

Here Whitman appears as the embodiment of the one who has closed the distance between "the ways things are and what there is." Here there is no objectification, no separation, no comparison, no contradiction. He knows himself as the one who has no second. The one without a second is not the ego. It is the one who exists as the affirmation of the way things are. There is no side to defend. No identification with partial views or with partial interests. There is one self-interest. All is a diverse expression of the same self-nature. The genuine self-nature of the human being is not partial; it upholds the life of the whole. Such a one can affirm like the rush of a brook; he can speak truth like a clap of thunder. He does not hold onto his truth.

I recall attending a lecture of Dainin Katagiri Sensei (later Katagiri Roshi) at the San Francisco Zen Center in the late 1960s. Sensei was lecturing on some particular point of Buddhist philosophy when a listener raised his hand and began to argue or to contradict the point that he was making. Katagiri just smiled and answered in his Japanese English, "This is not my big deal."

It is a phrase that has remained with me all my life. Whatever it is that I can say or think or believe; whatever position I may take; whatever can be put into words; whatever I may seem to be identified with "is not my big deal." Yet people spend their lives fighting each other over their "big deals." The biggest deal we make is over our sense of self, our survival, and especially our own rightness. Every position and belief is an extension of that. It might be helpful in our own practice to shine the light of awareness on our day-to-day and moment-to-moment responses in order to see where our "big deals" lie.

It is recounted that Buddhanandi, a famous dialectician and debater, and seventh in succession in the lineage of the Buddha, first approached his destined teacher, Vasumitra, and said, "I have come to debate truth." He is enlightened beyond his partiality when Vasumitra replies, "Dear friend, if we debate, it will not be truth."

Vasumitra is not saying, "My truth is undebatable. It cannot be contradicted." Vasumitra is pointing to prajnaparamita, that truth which is undebatable because it has no sides, no partiality; that truth which cannot be contradicted because it includes and embraces all contradiction; that truth which has no fixed ground on which the ego can stand and assert itself. It has no big deal.

Whitman's truth, the direct realization of the way things are, is in immediate supply. It is not objectified or made distant. His utterances are naturally outrageous to those trying to maintain some rationality, propriety, safety, or control within an objectified view of themselves and the world.

This objectification of self, or ego, is a shrinking or contracting away from the divine life we actually inhabit—until truth itself becomes an idea, an object. We are trapped within our mental structures and we pray to this idea of Truth, or the Divine, to save us. This is the format of conventional religion. For that matter, it is the format of all conventional belief and conventional desire—in which the belief, or the object of desire, becomes the truth that will save us.

But Whitman, instead of projecting and shrinking, _fills out_ and inhabits the full dimension of who he actually is, knowing truth as the simple expression and experience of his own being.

No wonder he can sing.

# Nothing Knows

As for the real... it is original wakefulness

that is empty in essence, cognizant

by nature, and all-pervasive in its capacity.

—TULKU URGYEN RINPOCHE

Nothing is... but nothing knows—

Wrinkles smile and wriggles toes.

Eyes that open and that close,

Nothing is, but nothing knows.

Nothing was and nothing will.

Pond reflects when wind is still

And sun is golden on the hill.

Nothing was and nothing will.

Nothing's born and nothing dies.

Nothing's bright and nothing's wise.

Nothing flowers like a rose.

Nothing is, but nothing knows.

Nothing loves and nothing sings,

Nothing's true of everything—

Plays the game of "just suppose."

Nothing is, but nothing knows.

# Commentary: "Nothing Knows"

Well, what to say of this nursery rhyme? It was written as a playful response to the words of Tulku Urgyen Rinpoche that head the poem: that fundamentally it is empty essence (or essencelessness, nothing) that is cognizant, or knowing. The poem is actually a response to the humorous paradox of language and its capacity either to get stuck on itself or to point beyond itself, according to how our minds receive it. Hence the paradox of the word "nothing," which, as soon as it is said, becomes "something." Or, it is as if the Rinpoche is making the absurd statement: "There isn't anything, and it's really smart." And we naturally tend to take "isn't anything" and turn that into something called "Nothing," and then tell a story about it as a way of explaining everything. Whew!

As long as we take language as literal representation with a literal reference, we will miss the boat on one side or the other. Emptiness, nothingness, _shunyata_ will always be imagined as a special kind of thing or condition; and _prajnaparamita_ —"the wisdom that goes beyond"—will always be imagined as "something" that goes beyond something to "somewhere." In truth, "emptiness" signifies "empty of our projections of concrete or fixed reality or separate existence." And "gone beyond" signifies "gone beyond our linguistic creations and mental structures"—even the structure of "something" or "nothing." That is why, as we are told over and over again, our own mental processes keep us from seeing what is right before our eyes.

The great ninth-century zen master Huang Po says simply, "There is nothing which can be said or made evident. There is just the omnipresent voidness of the real self-existent nature of everything, and no more." Huh? In the same spirit four centuries later the Tibetan dzogchen master Longchenpa confirms, "Everything is the adornment of basic space and nothing else." The mind naturally wonders whether such words refer to a mundane experience or to a cosmic experience. Do not imagine it to be either.

The Buddha, wandering in the forest one day, was approached by a man who was struck by his countenance, and who asked, "What are you? Are you a saint, a yogi, a savior?" And the Buddha replied: "I am awake." This simple original wakefulness is empty of all fixed qualities other than its own nature, which is intrinsically aware and conscious. This is "omnipresent voidness" or "basic space," awake by nature. This awakeness, this union of knowing and empty being, the original and only knower, is the all-pervasive joyful reality unhindered or unstained by any apparent phenomena, yet manifesting freely in all of it, subject to no politics, no philosophy, no religion, and no personal drama.

Inconceivable reality is empty of the mental categories of "liberation" or "non-liberation." It is empty of "truth" or "illusion." Hence, it is potentially either, and may manifest as either in consciousness: self-aware of its own transparency or provisionally identified with its creative forms and expression. In fact, no experience, nothing, _strays from,_ but is simply a _display_ of what Longchenpa calls the _basic space_ of phenomena. Basic space, or the underlying Nothing—which is timeless awareness itself—is either (or simultaneously) recognizing itself directly or lost in its own dualistic display. This means that within the basic space of aware loving being—from which nothing ever strays, is "less than," or is "other"—there is simply realization or its lack. That's all! Nothing either knows or it doesn't! And that is us now! That's this!

Our cognizance, or awareness, which is none other than this transparent reality, can identify with the apparent solidity of our experience, the apparent concreteness of things, and the apparent solidity of our own thought forms and emotions—including the thought of an "I" who is the doer and the knower. Or we may, at any moment, relax that identification and allow our awareness to resume its transparency, its essential and existential freedom, simply shining and illuminating our absolute nature as well as illuminating and effacing any conditionally arising forms and thoughts.

To bring this down to earth, let me quote here a self-described "low-key" experience recently reported to me by a participant in one of our retreats. She is an experienced contemplative, but her experience is not that singular or inaccessible to us: "On Friday I seemed so easily able to fall into a deep contemplation and I found myself opening wider and wider until I knew I was the mother of all mothers, that what the Buddha knew I now knew too—we are here from the beginning and perfect. How does this knowing differ from knowing intellectually? Because it is embodied in my being. Shortly after that, what I cannot describe came into me as the sea mists scudding before the wind, enfolding me, wrapping me into itself, every nook and cranny and cell of my body. My stuff, my story, fell away and there _I_ was, Being with a capital B. And so was everyone else in the room. And the room itself, the trees, the Kleenex boxes in all their splendor. At the same time that the experience was low-key it was absolute. Being is what it is."

If we look back again at the Rinpoche's words, which express the essence of Mahayana insight, we may also see that something else very playful and universal is reflected here. Leaving aside for a moment our various scientific or religious pantheons, whenever we try to reduce reality to one principle, whenever we try to capture the absolute essence of things, what we actually end up with is a dance; a dance not of one, but of three inseparable aspects—whether in the phenomenological language of Buddhist thought: empty essence, awake nature, and responsive capacity—or in the theological language of Christian thought. It is the same trinity referred to in the Hindu name for the Divine— _Satchitananda. Sat_ is empty being; _chit_ is consciousness; and _ananda_ is the abundant and generous and unconfined nature of being—the willingness to get involved—overflowing into expression, evolution, and realization as its all-pervasive capacity. Its energy is joy. Its actuality is love.

Buddhism speaks of the dance of reality as the _three bodies_ ( _kaya_ ) of the Buddha. Sound familiar? Empty essence is the _dharmakaya;_ consciousness or illumination is the _sambhogakaya;_ and their inherent unity is also their endless all-pervading capacity, or responsiveness, to manifest as everything, especially as the compassionate incarnate activity of the _nirmanakaya,_ the Buddhas, awake "individuals"—or, fundamentally: me and you. These three qualities _are_ the Divine Ground, the Divine Person, or even the Divine Imperson, if you will. They are not separate and they are not objective. They are Nothing. They are infinite expression. They are both inside and outside of time. They are the body of reality. They are trinity.

These three kayas are our own mind, our own nature. So although these terms can remain abstract or abstruse philosophy, they reflect and record a direct experience of reality that is accessible to our own investigation. We are not merely able to speculate about metaphysical truth, but also to actually inhabit, or to embody, the most profound truth as not separate from what we are. When we relax the mind and resume our natural spaciousness, _empty presence, awareness, and compassion_ is our own fundamental experience.

There is a several-thousand-year rumor that says that monotheism was the great theological advance of mankind, and we seem to have a love affair with the "One." This "One" became the totalitarian basis for early institutional Christianity: One God, One Savior, One Truth, One Bishop—and the laity better listen up. But you have to be a bit heavy-handed to keep "One" from getting away from you. It is always wanting to morph into many, into male and female, into diversity, into nothing at all or into interpenetrating ecstasy. Even in the most developed theologies of One, we see it keep slipping into three. Even among the most patriarchal of ones and threes we see the suppressed feminine being projected and elevated. "One" can be a cosmic stick-in-the-mud, Miss Grundy calling us to button our blouse when everyone else is dancing naked in the street.

Actually the great "theological" advance of humankind is the capacity to see into the nature of things; to see patterns of experience at ever more underlying and integrative levels, and to allow that seeing to serve ever more humane and compassionate ends. This ever-awakening capacity has been with us for a long time. It is opened to in each moment that we rest in empty presence. It is not a rational faculty, although it may inform our rationality. And it shines through our attention in all cultures and historical times. Attentive to the fire, attentive to the stars, attentive to one's camels, attentive to the loom, attentive to the sick and the dying, attentive to ritual offering, when there is no self-involved thought to cloud the simple manifestation of being, that moment may already be the embodiment of open-eyed realization prior to our ideas of any philosophy or practice. And this maturing capacity, varying among individuals, may be as present in polytheistic, shamanic, and indigenous responses to reality that celebrate and engage the diversity of the manifest dance, as it may or may not be in our monotheistic systems.

When _we_ recognize the fact that _this is_ simply God, we can celebrate the universal self-realization of being with fewer ideas about what realization looks like. The circle is always complete. Who mends the fishnet is also the fish. Who hears the bird is what is calling _as_ the bird. Who feeds the gods, feeds with the gods' own hands. Original empty awakeness is always dancing with itself. _This_ is the moment to notice. We bring _our own_ realization, our own empty presence, to the fore over and over again. Beyond that, what do we know? Our spiritual genius lies not in theology—not in our various paradigms of one god, many gods, no god, or quantum physics. It lies in the depth and quality of our relationship to the mysterious and reciprocal reality in which we find ourselves, whose proof is in the subjective pudding of our lives, not in our illusion of cultural or theological superiority.

The genius to be found in much indigenous spirituality is the round and personal engagement with life in all of its cycles and aspects of natural and divine manifestation, honoring and feeding both light and shadow within the realm of divinity. This does not preclude that same human wisdom that allows any individual an intuitive or intrinsic grasp of "essence"—not as a category but as a wholeness of being—underlying the relationship to many. That essence is also what gets projected as the great "One" of monotheism. As an intimate experience it is free, wonderful, and profound. As a projection, however, underlying essence becomes ultimate overweening authority. The imperial sun god banishes diversity to the shadows, only to fight never-ending skirmishes or scorched-earth campaigns against self-nature. This is inevitable when fundamental experience gets distanced into language in service of the egoic mind, and then further distanced into ecclesiastical doctrine, and then further into competing doctrines, and then further into systems of domination and control—the terminal end of that degenerative condition known as "hardening of the categories." This is the unfortunate history of much of Christian theology, including the theology of trinity, as its original diverse and gnostic quality was suppressed. And Buddhism doesn't have its hands clean either. It's plenty capable of distancing intimate reality into literalist doctrine. That's what we do.

But essence is fluid, not exclusive. It is not One, but All including One. God is not sovereign but vulnerable. Trinity is not doctrine but tango. Prajnaparamita is not only the mother of the Buddhas but the mother of poetry. The medicine is to drop our attachment to the concept-forming activities of the mind, to the literalism of language, and to the love of doctrine, and always to return to simple presence. To intimacy. To vulnerability. To dance. Which is what trinity—what reality—is really about.

What all these gnostic trinitarian teachings—Buddhist, Hindu, Christian—are telling us is that reducing anything to one—including God—is just an arbitrary principle of the mind. The mind can conceive "one," but where do we see "one" anywhere? It can serve as inherited or _a priori_ doctrine, but it doesn't stand up to investigation. Certainly particle physics and quantum physics have not brought us closer to one, but closer to mutuality and paradox. One is an imaginary number. But no more imaginary than all the other possibilities. They represent an infinite potential beyond the mind's dualisms and beyond the mind's ability to conceive.

God, fundamental reality or ultimate ground, is not a monolith, but a seed; not a "thing" but an intimate potential. We can, for example, superficially refer to the form of a seed as "one"; but the seed is actually a dynamic potential, a _mutual play_ of inherent forces or relationships, an ancient and intimate mystery that transmits and births an infinite progression of life and form beyond itself. The dynamic mystery of the seed manifests beyond itself in future seeds, and in the whole expression of the plant, which in itself and in all its relations is more intimate mystery. Where, then, is there "one"? There is no "thing," only intimacy, which is the womb of creation; only interbeing; only the _dharmadatu_ of interpenetrating totality. It is the primary and eternal mystery of intimacy, or mutuality—and we are its expression. That intimacy is what arises for us in our own experience of contemplation. We allow ourselves to become vacant and fertile ground in which that seed, that plant—the expression of primordial intimacy—can arise.

Thus, I have become endeared to the essential poetry of trinity, apart from any doctrine, because it simply describes how _intimacy_ is built into the nature of being. (Perhaps the exquisitely intimate poetry of St. John of the Cross rings in my mind here.) The principle of trinity, whether expressed as Father, Son, Holy Spirit or expressed as Empty (Infinite), Awake, and Responsive (or as conscious, loving, and present), is reflecting the subtle intimacies of our own experience; and it needn't be mere doctrine or an instrument of control. Our essential reality, both beyond and within time and space, births its own dance, the dance of relationship. And the mystery of our lives is the embodiment of it all. The essential knowing spaciousness that we are, the continuous apparition of ourselves in so many diverse aspects, and the creative love play that informs such a magical display as our own existence and turns it in love back upon itself—these are not separate, but one; and they are a trinity.

If we could for a moment reclaim the dance of trinity as our own intimate story, disguised and distanced as it may be in our Christian culture, we could take some space to befriend (forgive) even those patriarchal words like Father and Son that may understandably have alienating power for some. We could see through them, and their tortured history, to that same life-giving stream out of which they, like all things, have arisen; that reveals the underlying poetry of Satchitananda. The _Father,_ our ground of being, is nothing in itself (empty essence), in eternal process of expressing its cognizance and love— _Holy Spirit_ —which in its infinite potentiality and joy arises as its own loving and beloved manifestation, the apparent form, the nirmanakaya, the _Son;_ which in turn rises in fullness as the Teacher, and who, in turn, demonstrates or embodies the identity of apparent form with the Whole. These three aspects of _ourselves_ are in eternal love tryst. It is _our_ love tryst, _our_ nature, and _our_ evolutionary work. The whole play of our lives and the whole story of creation is, in truth, the transparent manifestation of an intimate reality, this dancing union of "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit"; or, as Tibetan Buddhists put it less patriarchically, as the loving gaze of recognition between the Mother Light and the Child Light.

Indeed, we are the gaze that goes both ways: now lover, now beloved; now "father," now "son." There is a time to be a _child_ of the awesome immensity of Being, and also a time to take responsibility, to _maturely embody_ and to express that same life-giving power. There is a time to rest ourselves in the lap of the "Father" and there is a time to hold God's head in _our_ laps. Doesn't life (doesn't Jesus) also ask this of us? "Those who have fed the hungry have fed me." This absolute occasion of intimacy and responsibility (or avoidance) is true of every moment of our lives—as parents, lovers, friends, and citizens. It is the true reciprocity and dance of all our relations. It is the intimacy of our capacity to choose conscious loving presence. It is the revelation of our Christ-nature and of the three kayas.

All this may be known as living reality in the surrender of deep meditation or prayer, in the joyful communion of mystical experience; or, simply, as Life—in our direct, surrendered, and intimate experience here and now, manifest in how we live. This playful intimate reality is nothing at all but our own capacity to know and to appear. To arise as a smile. To wriggle the toes. To gaze outwardly with open eyes, or inwardly with eyes closed. To reflect the pure radiance of being when awareness remains unruffled by the winds of the mind. To celebrate, to praise, and to feed all manifestation in infinitely creative ways. To take the continual risk of intimacy and vulnerability as the unique occasion of this existence. There is no separate one who is born, no separate one who dies, no separate one who is clever or wise. There is "nothing"—other than that same undefined and unconfined aware capacity flowing into existence, singing out through all things, true of everything, playfully "supposing" every kind of self-limitation, speaking itself through all our language, inviting us to "believe," or simply: to sing.

# quantum mechanics

the gold leafed branch

arises in my mind and against the sky

as an offering to the knower

never before was there such a branch

and never before such a knower

this poem

arises in my mind

as if there were such a man,

as if I too had a history

beyond this time

as if there were more

than this unfailing agreement

to arise for each other

in beginningless new ways

right now

# Commentary: "quantum mechanics"

The gold-leafed branch rises in the foreground of awareness as I look to the sky. Lost in my history, I might say "my awareness" as if it were a product of "my" relative history. I might "just suppose" that the knower was an isolated person called Paul, who had a real personal history and wandered through the world knowing and not knowing, sometimes feeling included, sometimes feeling excluded. This is a dramatic fiction.

Awareness—the knower—has always been. All things arise to the knower. "My history" and the idea "my" is also an experience arising to timeless awareness, which has no history. And so awareness is always new. Never before was there such a branch and never before such a knower. Nothing other than this unfailing agreement to arise for each other in beginningless new ways right now. It is a love agreement; an intimate co-arising. It is an agreement of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Of Shiva and Shakti. It is also reflected and revealed in the Nguni Bantu term _ubuntu, "because we are, I am."_ And in the Tzutujil Mayan _kas-limaal,_ that "mutual ensparkedness" and delicious mutual indebtedness that is the foundation of, not the contradiction to, our freedom. It is the love agreement of the Self, playfully expressing as self and other, knower and known, across a timeless instant; across each branching quantum occasion of realization and possibility, fulfilled as the rich tapestry of our life.

Quantum mechanics reveals each moment to be a moment of infinite and random potential, of super-imposed possibilities of pure chance, spontaneously manifesting one of its potentialities in the next moment (or all of its potentialities in simultaneous moments!). It is the laughter of Coyote. We are arising together out of that laughter as a unique occasion of spontaneous and branching potential. As the divine dance of "you" and "I" in this moment. We are that.

# A Step Ahead of the Present

A step ahead of the present

the man is rescued from the well.

In the absence of presence

it performs fully.

Without the observer

there is vision.

# Commentary: "A Step Ahead of the Present"

This poem arose as a response to a zen koan, which says: "A man is at the bottom of a deep well. Without using an inch of rope, get him out." The mind is an endless well, and as long as we are using the mind to solve this problem, there is no end to the length of the rope we will need. When we drop the mind, there is no mind—and no well. There is only the pure activity of the universe.

The mind encompasses the three worlds of past, present, and future. It cannot find its own way out of that well for all of our most noble human endeavors. Philosophy, theology, spiritual practice, zen—are all in the well. Clearly past and future do not rescue us from that well. But neither does the present. The mind is always newly taking birth in the present. The zen patriarch Hui-neng demands: "Show me your original face before your mother was born." We may as easily ask who are you right before _this moment_ is born; before mind stakes its claim? Show me who you are _a step ahead_ of the present. Before there is anyone to be present.

In the absence of "presence," awareness already shines, hands and feet, heart and lungs are already wise and capable. Out of the well, the feet are free to roam on the earth. The hands are no longer grasping everywhere for a rope to save us. Without the problem and the problem-solver, without the rescued or the rescuer, we are already what shines. Without the observer, there is vision.

# Along the Piscataquog

The radiant

mind-star

at my

birth

descended

to my

feet

and kissed

the earth,

and

blossomed

as a

body bright

and fair

that moves

through love

and loves

to kiss the air—

and feel

my form extending

into space

where light

and

passion

interweave

like lace

and knit

each

tingling

song

of flesh

and bone

out of

intrinsic

wakefulness

alone.

This

self-illumined

presence

at my

death

will brighten

with

the passing

of my breath.

Beyond

all gain,

its essence

will

ignite

the falling

rain,

the moist

and moonless

night.

# Commentary: "Along the Piscataquog"

Here is the drama and passion of manifestation, all as the transparent play and dissolution of the Only Awake One.

Walking along the Piscataquog River one morning, I feel the ecstatic nature of my whole bodily being and am in love with it: the swing and openness of the hips, the simple surety of the stride, the length of my body from the crown to the ground as it moves through the air with its outreach and embrace of being. I feel the wonder of the radiant source enlivening my bodily existence as It "bends" to kiss the earth down through what is thereby created as my etheric potential, now blossoming into physical form. The original and spontaneous interplay of light and passion continues to express as my own light and passion, rising as the trembling songs of my own flesh, yet as nothing more than the free expression of Original Intrinsic Awakeness.

This self-illumined presence has only momentarily expressed through me. With the passing of my form the presence will still abide in its selfless effulgence as the only awake one. There is no loss or gain here. Just the empty manifestation of this mountain and river body, of the bright moon that is also the moonless night, the moist and dark unknowing, falling as rain without a self. _What about_ that infamous tree falling in the forest?

moonlight is falling

quietly across the pines.

no one to witness.

# The Missing Monk

To your hermitage here on top of the mountain I

have climbed without stopping... Sorry though

I am to be missing you, you have become my

meditation.

—CH'IU WEI

My master's gone to gather herbs. I only know he's

on this mountain, but the clouds are too deep to

know where.

—CHIA TAO

The missing monk is present in every age.

He is the one everybody writes about but never finds.

He is the one busy being what everyone else

is writing about.

If you run up mountains after bricks and stones

you will never find him.

The courtyard will always be abandoned. The cave

will always be empty.

The monk is resting under the eaves of your mind.

He takes his ease in the interior bamboo grove.

He doesn't harp on your delusions and infirmities.

He is waiting for you to call.

He is waiting for you to make the same confession

I make to you now: I am the missing monk.

I am always off gathering herbs somewhere.

I am never where I look, but I am always returning

You'll know me by the eyes.

Stay here, and enjoy

my simple fare: radishes and moonlight on this

crumbling wall.

# Commentary: "The Missing Monk"

If you spend much time perusing classical Chinese poetry you'll notice that one of the recurrent themes is that of the poet who journeys up the mountainside in search of the hermit, sage, or hidden adept, only to prove unsuccessful in finding him. In addition to the examples that head this poem, I will offer you two more:

Tumbling waterfalls hang from the green cliff.

No one can tell me where you are.

—LI PO

In fallen leaves that have heaped the bare slopes,

how should I ever find his footprints?

—WEI YING-WU

The sage is going about his own business while everyone else is running about looking for him or committing him to literary history in his own absence. This recluse, who is our own true self, is not really lost to anyone except to the poet, who in this case is our creative, restless, and well-intentioned mind seeking itself everywhere.

In this poem, I call the elusive quarry "the missing monk." The word "monk" comes from the root _monostoi,_ which means "solitary," or "one." If you think he only lives in the poetry of ancient China, then please look in the mirror. The missing monk is the One that we ourselves are—that transparent or true self that is simply already the case, looking out of our eyes, but that somehow continues to elude us. He is just as present now as he was in ancient China; while we are still writing or speaking about him, or seeking him in every place and practice. If we run up mountains after bricks and stones, we will never find him. If we try to get there by some outer device—including our mental devices—thinking, "I'll just do this, I'll just do that," or "I'll get there, I'll find it," then we are always running away from him. Even Jesus says very plainly, "The kingdom of God is not 'lo, here' or lo, there.'" And when he adds that "The kingdom of God is within you," he is not referring to some other objectified place, some location inside our minds or bodies called "within." He is referring to the transparent nature of what we already are.

That underlying and all-pervading transparency—the missing monk—becomes apparent only when all mental forms and projections simply relax or our attachment to them melts away. Then the monk is seen to be resting under the eaves of all the frantic activity of our own minds. He is not sitting there observing or caring about or judging all the limitations that we get caught up in. Our self-judgments are simply part of the activity and the projections of the mind. Whereas "that which we are" is just waiting for us to call. It is like a plea coming from our Beloved. But since there is no actual separation, there is no place we have to go to, and there is no final arrival. What then is the response to the call?

The response is when we can make the confession: I _am_ the missing monk. We are that one. We can make that confession superficially, "Yeah, okay, I'm the missing monk. I read that somewhere." But a true confession only happens after we surrender; when we are in the hands of a higher law. Then there is authority. Other than that, anyone can talk big in any bar. But it is after you surrender your separateness that the confession means something. In a sense, the surrender _is_ the confession—when our underlying nature effaces our grasping at external identities. Then we are already making our confession _as_ that One, _as_ the missing monk.

So I confess: I am the missing monk. I am always wandering off, by nature, to gather herbs, to play in the fields of phenomena, until I am looking outward and can't see me. But I have never gone anywhere. That one is playing hide and seek in all of us; but the eyes are the windows into that secret. How do we allow them to speak? Those eyes that have become clarified with generous intention and true openness are the clearest windows into the soul. Those eyes that are preoccupied with other motives and identifications are more opaque. When you look into them the energy seems to stop right there. The window is cloudy. But when the eyes are open, when there is simply presence, you can go on forever; you can bathe in that non-separateness.

_Stay here and enjoy this simple fare._ Staying here is just what is hard for our minds to do. As is enjoying simple fare. It's hard for the mind to stay here because it's looking for something more exciting. We are raised on psychic salt and sugar and fried oil. But simple fare—just being here—doesn't have so much taste in the beginning. Few of us can enjoy this simple fare, moment to moment. Few of us give ourselves permission to do that, because we don't really believe that being here is sufficient. We believe something else instead. So this monk is calling out to us and saying, "It's OK. Stay here and enjoy _this_ simple fare; _my_ simple fare." Radishes and moonlight—the simplest food of the earth, and the original light of our being—on this crumbling wall.

Crumbling, after all, because we're not sitting on any solid edifice. We can't create a bastion of realization, or a bastion of enlightenment, or a bastion of "the way things are." We can't build a fortress around the moonlight. It's not a fortress of truth. It's crumbling out from under us all the time, because it's not a thing. We can never fix on it and say, "There, I've got the truth." There is only the willingness to be present and to dance on this crumbling wall; to give it back over to emptiness; to see that there is no missing monk at all.

# through the cracks in my roof

through the cracks

in my roof,

the

moon appears

in my morning tea

# Commentary: "through the cracks in my roof"

Yes.

# the mind is autumn

not by meaning,

we fall precisely through

the ornamental

and find the original space;

but lazily,

it doesn't matter.

the western hedge,

after the clover—a new tide

laps the meadow;

a perfume lingers

here, but is always passing.

it isn't a matter

of color anymore:

it's so familiar—like touching

our own skin.

we occupy our place

completely,

not by knowing

# Commentary: "the mind is autumn"

Our minds are routinely preoccupied with the ornaments of our egoic existence, and the meanings we assign to it. Yet if we relax our hold on those meanings we drop into the original space of our being, only to discover it is the space we have always inhabited. This original spaciousness of being is the space of "things as they are," perfectly rising and falling, before we assign our meanings. And, whether or not the mind concurs, that space is always and already holding us.

Thus, not by meaning—not by virtue of all the _meanings_ we assign to things; nor by _meaning_ to do it—but by an essential laziness (as the Taoists might be fond of saying), we enjoy moment by moment the original space that is beyond all striving and beyond all egoic necessity. Of this laziness the ancient poet Tao Yuan-Ming writes, "Leaning on elbows, we shall not harm the inward wholeness." And, "If you can see how much height fills whatever you do, what need have you to climb the sacred mountains?"

Leaning on elbows, reclining in the Tao, no sacred pose or effort is required to force or resist what is already so. The moon doesn't struggle to retain its shape, yet its nature is ever whole. As in the tai chi circle, perfect fullness contains the essence of its own transformation and demise, which in turn contains the seed of future ripeness.

So are we able to sit in the late-summer meadow as the tide of ripeness embraces and is swept by the new tide of decline. The perfumes of blossom and of birth have long been replaced by the perfume of summer grasses and of growth; and now the perfume of ripeness embraces the perfume of passing. The fragrance of rise greets with relaxed and familial love the fragrance of return. And every passing perfume lingers here a while for our enjoyment, but is not graspable; just as the finest incense is not truly tasted by "breathing deeply," but by letting it be.

It is no longer a matter of externals or of ornamentals, or of the form and color of things; but of the essential and inward familiarity of being at home in our own skin. The whole of being and becoming is revealed as that same skin, familiar to our touch, in the laziness of the late-summer meadow. We already occupy our place, both beyond and within time and change, completely; not by grasping nor by any necessity, and not by anything that is needed to be known.

# Sext

Summer, too, is a death:

of blossoming greenness, of apple

and lilac dementia,

and furtive epiphany.

Something that cries "holy"

between the worlds

takes on the mantle

of solidity.

And that which leaps there,

enrapts us at the moment of birth,

calling us to ourselves,

is never again beheld—

but always lived now,

summer's dreaming:

into the fruiting

of the fields,

the voices of the scythes,

where sleeps the glorious story;

and we play.

# Commentary: "Sext"

_Sext_ is the prayer at high noon in the liturgical cycle, or _six_ hours after the first prayer of the day. And this poem too is a prayer at high noon, a poem at midlife. The summer of our lives has already brought the death of so much that is momentary, cyclic, and tender. We may seem to have lost the miracle years of birth and of youth, when the mystery of the unborn still freely penetrated into our lives, when the freshness of each new thing called through the veil of our worldliness, offering us one last chance to remember who we really are before getting lost in the play; before that fluid voice, the "call" that lives in all things, takes on the apparent mantle of solid and separate and alien thingness. The Goddess, awake and trembling, out of pure love for our drunken and forgetful existence, is willing to be captured in sheer form.

So spring totters momentarily on the brink in its vulnerable lilac ecstasy, as its new shoots and delicate green give way to the sturdy and fully embodied business of summer. And our lives take on the same solidity, now fully identified with the drama and the meanings we have come to assign to ourselves. Our only reminder of what is lost is our own nostalgia for something we can't quite place; that keeps us looking backward or forward to that "lost moment," never again beheld. And yet...

The secret is that we have never lost this timeless moment of creation and mystery; we have never left it behind. We are always living it, right into the dream of summer and fall. It is the very Dreamer. We are the freshness of morning playing out our role as high noon, later as dusk. We are the moment of birth, peering out of the eyes of a fading old man. We are springtime, dreaming its way through summer; dreaming its way into the fruiting of our own fields; into the unfoldment of all cause and consequence; into the blessing we may leave behind as our individual fruiting falls and seeds another time; into the voices of the scythes that tell us: this summer is done. We are death and rebirth.

In all of this there sleeps the glorious story of who we really are; of what is at play here in the fields of the Lord. We are always at play, a play that engages and demands all the heartfelt intention and seriousness of our life. And now, as we awaken, we are free to play with all the affirmation of our being.

# Understanding Tom Bombadil

I awake to the patter of rain on the broad leaves

in the forest night,

the exaltations of moss in the milky dark.

The rhythms of forest and sky

cradle my bed in the small dry hollow

where the heart is wide,

where the golden-haired mistress of river song

sleeps by my side.

We are old in a landscape beyond

all right and wrong,

beyond the pursuing of whither and why

and all the mind's doing.

And the forest drips with the breath of night

and sways with the soft wind's wooing.

Here we have made our home

in the circle dance beyond all coming and going;

in simple appearance,

without urgency or knowing,

with never a loss and never an accruing,

save of the green world coming into fruit

and ever and ever renewing.

Tonight the wild wood sings of itself,

and even the shadows glisten.

And I curl myself, my bride against my heart,

and listen.

# Commentary: "Understanding Tom Bombadil"

I have often mused, as many have, on the enduring and mysterious figure of Tom Bombadil, perhaps the most singular figure in Tolkien's _The Lord of the Rings._ He appears early and briefly in the first volume, and never appears again. But he is the one character in the entire tale who is not affected by the ring of power. He slips it on and off his finger with no compulsion and with no effect. He dwells beside the forest with his golden-haired bride, the river woman's daughter. He is husband to the Goddess. He is the playful keeper of the woods. He is the ancient and formative power of the earth. He is simplicity itself, beyond the agendas of the mind. He will not acquire any fame. In fact, he does not make it into the movie!

His simple appearance, or being, has none of the urgency or self-consciousness of the egoic drama being played out across Middle Earth. He is our Buddha-mind, our Earth-mind, beyond gain or loss. In a sense, he is neutral; but his neutrality is the very blossoming and endless renewal of the green earth. His bride against his heart, his is the marriage of form and emptiness. He is the great intimacy and the great receptivity. He is the activity of the green earth. This is his song.

# There Is No Woman

There is no woman

lying upon the world

just over that hill

or spread out by the river,

waiting for me.

There is no dakini

in the sunlight by the

waterfall, offering me

fruit from her basket

and taking me

between the rocks.

No—in fact, there is

all of that! But she

is not here to feed my

ancient hunger. She is

not here to fulfill

the fantasy of my mind's

longing. She is not

here to answer the

addictive expectation

that lines my bones

and directs my walking.

She is here only

to play her own songs

of appearance and

disappearance, to fulfill

her own dreams of

everlasting renewal,

to be feasted,

celebrated, and praised

by one who has

grown wise in his loving.

# Commentary: "There Is No Woman"

Even decades of practice and experience don't necessarily spell the death of what Rumi called "the wanting creature inside of me." After all, it is entirely natural for life to rise up and say "I want." But the psychodynamics of human life can easily turn that wanting into a tar-baby of addictive need, as the natural desire for pleasure and for a sense of completeness, the early experience of separation, our unique emotional history and imprints, our biochemistry and neural wiring, add up to a perfect storm of unfulfilled wanting that is our constant subtext. These addictive tendencies may not always manifest in the grossly dysfunctional patterns by which we commonly define addiction; but they may nevertheless prove dysfunctional with regard to the depth of our spiritual and relational life. For they go to the heart of the drama of separation that defines the boundary lines of our relationship to self, to another human being, to the divine, or to our own ground of being and happiness; and they subject all experience and all others to the projective drama of a separate and unfulfilled life.

My longing may arise in me as a romanticized longing for the goddess that can direct itself anywhere into the material world; for, after all, it is the goddess, the mother, the matrix, _mater,_ that is embodied in matter itself. Many story traditions preserve the memory of the fallen goddess, dismantled into the natural world and forgotten by the distracted psyche, and whose divine sparks, or whose very bones, need to be regathered or remembered back into life. How I understand or approach this task—the resurrection of the goddess—will mean all the difference between unreflective, "uninitiated," or addictive behavior vs. the capacity to sustain the creative tension of genuinely transformative and earth-sustaining spiritual growth.

Thus I may maintain in my nervous system the ever-present vigilance and expectation that just over the next hill is the woman—be she lover, dakini, or divine mother—ready to welcome me into some final happiness. I say "woman" here both literally and figuratively—that she is there stretched out by the river waiting for me, or that just around the next bend of the river is the dakini by the waterfall, offering me her magical fruits of ecstatic embrace. This is the buzz of sexual addiction or of any addiction to outer fulfillment. It is the buzz that something outside of this moment will satisfy or complete me. And it is accompanied by the inherent expectation that "this," that life, is all here for my satisfaction; that there is, at the last, the blissful fulfillment of "me." (And doesn't much of our contemporary "spirituality" also give us this message?) Fundamentally, and in short, it is the illusory belief and the paradigm that egoic-based happiness and satisfaction can ultimately be attained—someday.

Thus the obvious addictive process is the reflection of an even subtler spiritual addiction: the idea that everything is here for me, the ego, and the need to manipulate to assure that this is so. This is the underlying principle of _manas,_ or the egoic mind, as expressed in Buddhist abhidharma psychology. It is awareness reflecting back on its own mother-ground, or fundamental being, encircling a portion of this ground and calling it "me" or "mine"; which now becomes the essential unit of being, promoting itself or seeking "salvation." This seems to be natural. But in so doing it creates an illusory—and desperate—separation from its own mother-ground.

Freud was on the same track here. He says that the flow of libidinous or life energy withdraws from our field of relations and becomes diverted to an introjected self-image and an introjected image of the other. That is, we have flattened the life energy of actual relationship at a deep structural level by redirecting it to a virtual inner reality; one that has encompassed, and is a stand-in for, the mutuality of "self and other"—allowing the ego to function like a little god.

This is the point at which the divine or primordial awareness in us, sometimes referred to as Buddha Samantabhadra, surrenders the recognition of its identity with the mother-ground and all of its play of manifestation, referred to as Samantabhadri, Samantabhadra's divine consort. This is what Buddhist teaching would refer to as our original ignorance—our loss of recognition—of the identity of our intrinsic awareness with all manifested experience; or, more commonly put, of our "oneness with everything." To the subjective self it is at once the loss of the mother and of the goddess, perpetually maintained by the logic of separateness, loss, and fear of death leading to strategies of exploitation, acquisition, and domination.

Thus, addiction arises as instinctive strategy along with the first experience of separateness, and it serves to maintain that experience. It maintains a virtual world of loss and ever-sought-for recovery that animates the dance of our nervous system. The egoic—and, we might say, primordially addicted—point of view is both born of, and leads to, a familiar inward or sucking movement of consciousness that draws the world into _itself,_ and, in this process, diminishes or congeals the world's power and dimension—the sacredness of the _other—_ in the process. It is a cognition that shrinks and encapsulates because it cannot hold the sacred reality of the world in its diminishing grasp. It can no longer recognize the rainbow radiance of all life, consciousness shining out of all things. Hence it denies consciousness and aliveness to the natural world and to others. It guarantees that the world is not truly seen. This habit of diminished seeing, and the addiction to separation and grasping, are the activities of a separated and alienated self, and they are mutually reinforcing. (In the bigger picture this might rightfully be seen as a transitional stage of egoic consciousness, but the full transition or restoration to the recognition of wholeness is rarely made.)

I am mindful that the imagery and the point of view in this poem is naturally male, and, in truth, must invite the female voice to be complete. After all, looking at our several thousand years of male domination from the standpoint of addiction, we might conclude that to colonize the world with the male point of view has been one of the very effective male strategies for coping with the addiction to having a steady supply of "the world as I need it to be"—a world in which the loss of the feminine can be counteracted by domination of the feminine, which ultimately is matter itself. This has long been the institutionalized boyish solution to having to experience things as they are; to having to experience the world as a diverse, chaotic, multi-phasic, multi-gender, and mutual reality, in which "I" am not in charge nor at the center, nor _for myself;_ but am instead one with a _field._ It is within this field reality, by the grace of a humble and more integrated principle of surrender, reciprocity, and harmony, that I may ultimately realize the "non-self-based" fulfillment of my true nature. But the addictive solution, through the dramatization of separateness, bypasses our ability to feel, to acknowledge, and to assimilate the experiences of fundamental loss and of lack of control. And thus it bypasses as well our genuine and ultimate capacity for experiencing fullness.

The ability to feel and to metabolize our vulnerability is essential to our genuine healing, especially at the profound spiritual level. It is a passage through emptiness, trust, and tenderness that may ultimately blossom as instinctive peace between the masculine and the feminine sides of reality. It is, for the male and the female both, the embrace of original self-nature wholly expressed, which is at once the re-embrace of the earth and the re-embrace of the divine. Nothing less, it would seem, can truly heal history or culture. Whereas a collective psyche effectively divided from its wholeness and its source will sustain our cultural and technological alienation and narcissism at the expense of our earth mother.

The particular male form of the addictive solution (perhaps because men are less designed hormonally to gather together to hold the children) may also be expressed in varying cultic dramas of independence, avoidance, secrecy, or control in our individual lives and in our male-dominant institutions. Thus greed, avoidance, and control characterize the addictive consciousness of our political and economic institutions—and of the inevitably imperialist tide of world history. The relinquishment of this addictive consciousness would leave us more clearly available to completely and consciously acknowledge the independent reality and the primacy of the needs of other human beings; and of our actual equality, reciprocity, and mutual responsibility in all human civic and social relationships, in our relationship to the earth, and in our relationship to the sacred. This conscious and lived acknowledgment is what is constitutionally missing from our historical drama and our addictive conditioning; and our ideals will always be somewhat of a mirage, our economics exploitative and unsustainable, and our institutions dysfunctional and beyond political correction, until we arrive at a level of human consciousness that grants life back to the world, and happiness back to this moment; and releases the world, and others, even at the subtlest level, from having to play a role in our addictive story.

The experience of separation—and a sense of lack that leads to grasping—is an understandable and legitimate experience. But the lessons of maturity teach us that even the subtlest indulgence of a narcissistic response to this lack quickly entangles us in addictive patterns that only confirm our separateness and insufficiency. Denial or self-negation does no better. Either strategy reinforces our delusion and dependency, and opens onto the shadow realm of negativity and self-centeredness in which much of our worldly functioning occurs; acting out our perceived separation from love rather than being the source of its expression. What's more, the spiritual and the addictive are such shadows of each other insofar as they are each a reaching for the Beloved, that it may be no wonder that we frequently see people and teachers of seemingly significant spiritual "realization" manifesting grossly addictive patterns of behavior. The failure to humbly address the emotional hole that we may still be seeking to fill late into our spiritual practice confuses and distorts that practice itself.

The addictive premises live like a virus sequestered within the nervous system. Our addictive expectations are so deep that there may be no genuine solution for them other than to consciously incorporate them into our practice through our humble willingness to become awake to our patterns of exploitation, and to practice every day our capacity for awareness, vulnerability, understanding, and compassion. We must be willing to re-feel, directly embrace, and honestly address the actual emotional underpinnings of our life and practice. The very presence required to do this already opens the door to our fundamental wholeness. And we enable ourselves thereby to choose to drop the unconscious dramatization of our insufficiency and to instead _give_ to each and every experience _as_ the one who _is_ the giver. This is to understand the ecstatic demand of the gods that we be the feasters, not the feasted; to unbend our elbows and uncurl our hands at the deepest level of the psyche.

Ah, then we may allow in our experience an outward-flowing, inwardly released, or radiant movement of consciousness that by nature gives itself to the world and to everything it sees, as if gently and everywhere broadcasting the seeds by which things become perfectly themselves. This is the release of the libido back into the field. This open-handed seeing allows the world to reveal itself in its full dimension and power. It grants freedom and dignity, and reveals aliveness and consciousness in all things, and our behavior is informed accordingly.

Then we may feast and court the goddess by dedicating our contemplative, creative, and relational activity to that which is outside our narcissistic interests or self-reference; so that our daily existence is, in the truest sense, both the expression of, and a sacrifice to, what is holy: to the truth of our mutual existence. And further, we may celebrate the goddess through _our willingness to experience and express our own life—_ in its height and depth, in its joy and grief— _as, in itself, a complete and free offering, not as a dramatization of our addictive neediness._ To the extent that we have not yet owned the paradigm of our own wholeness—which includes the ability to metabolize our own feelings of loss, need, or limitation—to that extent we are naturally incapable of seeing others in their own light; we see them only as players in our own drama of need. The relinquishment of our drama is _the_ difficult and profound relinquishment—an ongoing act of faith and an act of healing—that truly allows the world to open to us; and allows us to uphold the world and others in their own wholeness.

We may then come to recognize this world in each moment, in its physical and its psychic manifestations, as a complete incarnation and gift of the gods. Or we may come to recognize it as a miraculous display of egoless being. In either case, the gift is offered so that we may reciprocate from the heart of our being. If we grab on to the gift as a way of trying to obviate an ancient sense of longing or conviction of separation, we only perpetuate that addictive separation. The gift remains life-giving and vital only when it is consciously celebrated and _offered back_ as an act of wholeness, not when it is addictively and unconsciously grabbed on to and taken hold of for ourselves.

When we offer the gifts of the goddess back to herself, in celebration of her own ancient desire for the continuous renewal of all life, both in the world of nature and in the world of the psyche, then we discover that there _is,_ in fact, a dakini by the waterfall who is every moment offering fruit from her basket. But the true freedom of that gift is able to be enjoyed only in the relinquishment of the drama of separation. Out of this may finally emerge the mature courting and exchange of gifts—and the true offering to the gods of the eloquent fruits of every moment of pleasure and pain—by one who has grown wise in his loving.

Today we share the addiction to separateness and self-aggrandizement as an entire cultural paradigm created around the belief in the private ownership, exploitation, and appropriation of the gifts of the gods and the gifts of the earth. It is a profound alienation from our source that only perpetuates the devastation and suffering in the world, and summons the incipient catastrophe that we face; and that will not change until we become wise in our loving and until we come to see the earth as a field of mutual nurturance and support, in which we are continually _offering our wealth back to its source._

Yes, everything is already here for us as part of that great cycle of reciprocity by which we are here for everything else. In fact, every occasion in life and every relationship is a holy field of power in which we are given the choice to exploit out of our fundamental sense of scarcity or to nourish out of our fundamental wholeness and abundance. To understand what this means, and to be true to it, is the real dharma practice; or the practice of a truly indigenous and mature culture—a culture that is one with its matrix, one with its soil. It is the practice of the truly mature soul, which can only be matured _in the practice._ Our true wealth, then, lies not in our capacity to fill ourselves from life's abundant table, but in the abundance of our own dedication to life where we stand, and in our own capacity to nourish and to praise. And to honor, in that way, the unencumbered freedom of life to manifest fully and uniquely in each situation, and in each human being.

# you think your future

you think

your future

lies

in who

you are

friend,

there is

a greater gift

than that

the joy

of the note

is to be

the music

the joy

of the drop,

the fountain

all destiny

is in

the disappearance

now

you're clutching

water

while the

river calls

you push at

the air

that's begging you

to breathe

you are

a tide pool

screaming at the

ocean

"don't come here"

a rainbow

thinking

what a clever

and colorful

fellow I am

no wonder you are afraid

of time

you're prospecting

a meager

claim

while fending

off the night

the nighttime is alive

with your ancient wealth

surrender

to the night

and _be_

the gold

# Commentary: "you think your future"

You think your future depends on who you are. Friend, there is a greater gift than that. Imagine a card game in which each player has been dealt a different hand, but each hand contains an ace. The hand we've been dealt is a gift—the gift of a "self," an individuality. And each of us wants to play our cards right. There seem to be no clear rules about how to do this. And the variables in the game are overwhelming. But our future, and our ultimate success or salvation, seem to depend on how we play our cards. This is the challenge we each face as an ego, as an individual self testing itself against the world. We all naturally want to win; we all naturally evolve different images of what winning looks like; different hopes and fears; different strategies for winning; different strategies for defending ourselves from the fear of failure. Some of these strategies remain conscious, some unconscious.

This phenomenon of the self is an amazing and unique play in consciousness. It is truly, in some way, a gift—as if a father were to say to his children, "Hey, I'm staking you each with $100,000. Go to Atlantic City and hit the casinos. By the time you're through you'll be rich or poor, and you'll have learned a lot."

So the adventure of individuality begins. A great journey through the realms of experiencing pleasure and pain, gain and loss, suffering, love, and wisdom. And, relatively speaking, it's a great gift. "Relatively" because it's based on the presumption of separateness; and that separateness fuels the fires of our ambitions, our strategies for success, our attachments to whatever enhances our sense of self, and our suffering. Along the way a lot of bad poetry and a lot of great poetry will be written. And the gods will smile at that.

But there is an even greater gift than that. The gift is simply that when we finally and lovingly surrender the fierce presumption of our separateness—on which our destiny or fulfillment seemed to depend—we experience the fulfillment of who we already have always been; not a separate individuality, but the expression of an individuality that is all-inclusive, and already fulfilled. We don't need to retreat from the playing field of this life; but we gradually learn to surrender the desperation of our separate identity to a prior happiness. And, lovely as that sounds, all the forces of inertia and of separateness, all of our investment in a separate meaning and a separate fulfilled future will resist.

It is like the note resisting being a part of the music; a drop resisting being part of the fountain, insisting that its meaning comes from its separateness. Take some time to imagine yourself in the position of the note or the drop to see how that feels.

In this relative world, our individuality is truly important; and naturally we don't want to surrender it to peer pressure, codependency, family systems, mass culture, the church, the state, or to any collective or cultic structures of unconsciousness. Our true individuality is the ace in our hand, the divine spark, and the very foundation of our democratic ideals.

But when we surrender that true individuality, that ace, to its true source, its true lover—to the living music, to the living waters—we discover an intimacy that is all aces, a fulfilled individuality that is not about "me." It is the ecstatic divine. This is only possible when our hearts become broken and expanded upon the rocks of that ocean; when the Secret Guest has come and stolen our heart in the moonlight and drawn us into his embrace; when the reality of love makes our identity willingly obsolete.

Right now we are clutching our little bit of water—the ace in our hand—while the whole river is calling to us. We are holding our breath in or holding it out, refusing to live or refusing to die, rather than surrender to the natural reciprocity and mutuality of the living breath. Imagine a tide pool staking a claim to its own kingdom, as if everything it was did not depend on its rhythmic surrender to the tidal flow of the great ocean. Imagine a rainbow presuming its insubstantial appearance to be real and substantial in its own right, and a basis for future glory. Given these conceits, how could we not fear the inevitable, progressive lessons of time?

We have staked a claim around the small and the separate, around what we think we know—and banished the unknown immensity of our own being into fearful darkness. But it is not dark. It is alive with the wealth of who we are. It will swallow us into joyful disappearance. It is the greater gift.

# Already happened

I wanted to speak the truth.

But there was only silence.

I wanted to spread the light.

But the light preceded me.

I wanted to save the world.

But it had already happened.

# Part Two

# Benediction

Goddess of love, thy

silken gaze befriend her;

and give to your blushing daughter

fruit of your vine, and such grace

extend her

as to disclose in all

things small

her daily provender.

Trickster of time, least

can you stall

such sweet surrender as

will admit her lightest fall, fresh

through your

raking tines, into

love's garden

and heart's own lavender.

Tender-lipped night, bending

with upland dew

upon the sweet germander,

Well keep her hid there

against the darkened

moor, where pleasures leap

not out upon

the common traveler.

# Commentary: "Benediction"

Mother Prajnaparamita, inconceivably manifesting as the many-gowned goddess, removing each layer of her dress at her own delight; mother of all stories, peaceful, wrathful, and self-liberating: may the intimacy of your gaze in all things be the owner of our attention. May your bright face be revealed as the face of our stumbling and finite appearance, disclosing our daily bread, sweet nectar of your vine, the dharma song of all things, in each intimate occasion of our lives.

May time and her raking tines, the illusions of grasping and separation, be as empty vapor that has no power to distract from our surrender into the empty and fertile truth of love present, the aromatic delight of our own awakened heart.

Mother of original light, who bends to us now even as tender nightfall, effacing our frantic daydreams of birth and death; who bends to us with the moist breath of the nighttime in the womb of transformation we call earth: hold and conceal us long and close against your dark breast; your hidden warmth rising from beneath the desolate moor, where the carnival of the mind meets only indifference, where all strength must go to the root, where the seeds of the soul have time to sprout in emptiness, and the pleasures of the profoundly plain and simple may announce themselves in their time, wholly unnoticed by those who are still only rushing by and who have no power to disturb, to diminish, or to detract.

May all beings, fruits of the infinitely flowering tree, elf, grub, seed, bee, fish, sylph, and starlight, winds of the north and south, least asteroidal microbe traveling empty space, be so held, so fed, and so delivered. And may all run their course, true to their nature, free of our righteous control, our piety, and our best intentions.

# The Song That Is Before

Why wouldn't anyone

relax and float in the river of light

that is our home? Release

our hold on the molecules of our

appearance and allow

the pervading radiance to shine?

Can we hold our

precious features more dear

than the light will hold us?

More than our loving will anoint us?

Will we argue our case more

eloquently than the

light will speak it in translation?

Or entrust to our own bitter clinging

the desperate dream

that is already awake and

singing the song that is before

all darkness and all time?

# Commentary: "The Song That Is Before"

Why wouldn't anyone relax and float in the river of light that is our home? Alas, from the standpoint of our ordinary experience that sounds like a rhetorical question from someone whose head is in the clouds. But when we awake to that river of light, it is a most obvious, genuine, and compassionate question. It was the obvious question for me at the time of this poem, although the obvious answer was: because we rarely experience it.

Yet how obvious at such miraculous moments is the one light of presence shining through us all—as if the molecules of our being are the merest suggestion of a lattice work flowed through and carried along with light. It is light not only in the sense of "luminous," but also in the sense of "weightless," insubstantial, open, non-binding, yet playfully unfolding, an activity that is not an activity at all, an empty river of delight. It is our true self and our true home, expressing as us and already complete in its own activity. It requires nothing more from us, no need to acquire, accomplish, contrive, justify, or sustain. How easy it was to recognize my separated selfhood and all its issues as a moment of distraction within the light itself, like pixie dust in the eyes, hypnotized by the mirage of a separate identity to dramatize and defend. The fact that the whole world as we know it is animated by, and suffers through, this mirage of pixie dust, makes it no more real or substantial; nor does it separate us in truth or change our nature as that light.

The habits of attachment to this mirage are strong, leaving the sense that we need to manage the molecules of our own appearance (just as if a rainbow believed that it was its own separate solid thing, needing to manage the play of photons and molecules that display as a rainbow). But when we relax the illusion of needing to manage the light, and release our imaginary hold, the underlying radiance reveals itself as our pervading nature, all creative, all sustaining, and all complete. The very same was revealed to Dame Julian of Norwich, when she wrote, in a different poetry, "God maketh it; God keepeth it; God loveth it." And the question arises, "Why wouldn't anyone relax?"

The illusion of self is sustained by a subtle _activity_ of contraction, contraction within and away from the light, away from the openness of being; and by the _activity_ of control, the need to manage all of this illusory appearance. As we allow our attention to become subtle and honest, we may begin to notice our ongoing and pervasive activity of contraction from being that seems to override the activity, and the experience, of the natural radiance of being simply expressing as us. That subtle contraction reinforces our way of seeing, and that seeing reinforces the contraction, as our self-experience seems to congeal and separate out of the light. As such, it seems we must fight our own battles, argue our own case, and manage our own appearance on our own behalf. This is not to be flippant about our human condition; and not to dishonor our most noble attempts as human beings to be true to ourselves and to each other. But can we hold the features of our own appearance here as more dear than the light of universal love already holds us in entirety? Is there anything we can do to enhance ourselves more than we will be enhanced by our own surrender to love; our own acts of loving? Can we argue our case, and be more eloquent on our own behalf than that light, which by nature is already translating us, and revealing us to be none other than itself?

The great fourteenth-century Tibetan Nyingma master Longchenpa (close to the time of Dame Julian) speaks of the clear light of pure and total presence that creates and sustains everything, in which there is nothing more "to objectify, seek, or contrive" with body, speech, or mind. "Just relax in the reality of this blissful, self-generating pristine awareness... so that your pure and total presence may actually shine forth."

Though awareness is turned from itself by force of deep habit, there is a diligent path of relaxation and recognition, and a shift of awareness, that is naturally available to us. It is not at a distance from us, and it is not the province of any other time, person, or institution. It is a path of no path, and a shift of no shift, because that pure and total presence is already the radiant truth of us. Each time it gifts us and reveals itself in our awareness, shines through the very formative structures of our being, and briefly carries us downriver on its broad, flowing shoulders, it enables relaxation and recognition at ever deeper levels.

Why wouldn't anyone relax and radiate as that uncontrived and loving presence, the already light of our own being? We trust instead to our fearful clinging, to our control, to the logic and strategies of our personal and desperate dream of salvation or sorrow, of triumph or tragedy. Yet the dream itself is just a trick of light, made of that inherent awakeness that is already singing our true song, that from the beginning outshines the illusions of darkness and the illusions of time. Like the prodigal son, returning home with the dream of our own sin—darkness, distraction, and separation—hanging over our heads, we are amazed to find ourselves fully embraced and restored to what we have never lost, and to what has never rejected us: to our full and empty place in the generosity of being. Why wouldn't anyone relax there? I don't know.

# Go to the Limit

go to the limit of loneliness;

puncture the crust of emptiness.

you will find the all-sustaining heart.

an endless flow of devices

occupies the mind. they are all

like false dogs baying.

there are no yonder mountains.

on a moonlit night we glide forth,

leaving the safety of the bank

to bask in the glory of the shoreless one.

each moment is the satisfaction of the world,

fulfilling our ancient wish.

# Commentary: "Go to the Limit"

In our human experience we find ourselves ultimately alone. This can be either a fulfilled or a lonely experience—or both. We cannot escape our loneliness, although, at its best, the life of the human community and of the natural world may preciously ease or heal that ache. That is the natural gift that family, friends, the earth, and true companionship provide. Yet it never meets our needs perfectly, as if it were the completing half of a puzzle piece. It is a random, creative, unreliable, and unpredictable process by which we consciously and unconsciously woo, and are wooed in turn, by joy and sorrow, togetherness and aloneness.

When we breathe deeply, and embrace the whole of that process, we allow our full humanity, and our full spirituality, to thrive. When we contract in the face of aloneness—or of our own incompleteness—or compulsively seek to fill, obscure, or medicate each lonely moment, we actually keep our life small and dependent; truly separate. What does it require to allow ourselves, with wholeness of heart, to go to the very edges of the experience of loneliness? To look deeply into the well of emptiness? To embrace in our own hearts that which we would instinctively push away? To embrace the parts of ourselves—including aloneness—that we instinctively retreat from? There, reflected back from that borderless pool of emptiness that is able to receive the whole sky, we may discover the all-sustaining Heart; the Heart that truly holds us and embraces all the contradictions of our human experience. It is a reflection of the essential openness of our own heart, which is designed to hold the universe; which has learned not to forfeit its integrity to fear or contraction or ambition, and has thus won the prize of its own abundant self.

The mind—which is not a creature of that abundance—is forever occupied with devices and solutions to our perceived separateness. They are false promises and false solutions based on false perception. They compromise rather than nourish the natural integrity of the heart, which, as Tao Yuan-Ming suggests earlier, when it discovers its own natural heights abandons the mirage of distant mountains.

Zen master Daryu, who took his name from the mountain he lived on, was asked "What is the most wonderful thing in the world?" He replied, "I sit alone on Daryu Mountain." This might sound like a simple affirmation of solitude, separateness, or self-sufficiency. But if we look at the original Chinese characters, they read, "alone—sit—Daryu—Mount." That is, there is just this mountain sitting alone. There is no separation between Daryu and mountainous reality. I think he is saying,"I am intimately one with what is. There is only ultimate intimacy. That is the most wonderful thing in the world." Or perhaps Daryu might have responded with the simple words "Just this."

This poem—"Go to the Limit"—is an old poem. I discovered that I had unwittingly copied it long ago with two versions of the following line. And both are true. Originally it reads as I have it here: "On a moonlit night we glide forth, leaving the safety of the bank." This version is a celebration of the moonlight revealed; of the abundance that bathes us. In this instance, we already perceive that same great radiance extending everywhere—making it natural to leave behind the safety of the bank and glide forth in the undefined and shoreless light of being. But elsewhere I have copied it as: "On a _moonless_ night we glide forth..." Sometimes it _is_ a moonless night. We are in a deep unknowing. And still we walk with a tender presence of being, in the embrace of that unknowing; and we push off and leave the safety of the bank behind, letting the night take our little boat, trusting to the moon that is present in moonlessness, to the all-sustaining heart that is present in emptiness. We allow the dampness of the night to infuse the pores of our being. We allow the emerging moonlight to bathe the cells of our body. We relinquish our last commitment to separation.

It is here in this all-embracing capacity within the finite that the shoreless wonder of being manifests and bathes us. Then each moment is experienced as the fulfillment that all the karmic realms of existence have been crying out for. Each moment is experienced as the satisfaction of our most ancient wish: to be released from shadow into the interpenetrating reciprocity of light for light. That the cells of our true body may celebrate their hidden glory; that we may bask in the shoreless light of our hidden heart falling on our own shoreless sea.

# Just Sitting

It is the beauty of just sitting

that the great sorrow, the great failure

that breaks and illuminates our lives,

stretches before us like a lover waiting to be

made love to, or like one of the great cats,

whose purr sounds like a rumble from the heart

of the world and says, "Dance with us."

And the great failure burns with the fire of

ecstatic being, and the rains come

from over the mesa, across infinite space.

# Commentary: "Just Sitting"

Just sitting—zazen—is the essential zen practice. And with this title, this should be the shortest commentary in the book. But on the occasion of this poem, I had sat down very heavy-hearted, with an unspecific sense of sadness, failure, and separation. I found myself simply remaining present for the sensations, and even embracing them with relish, you might say, as if sitting down to a great feast. So here begins a long exploration of what is ultimately about just being here, albeit with welcoming awareness. Sitting is not a rarified practice, but a way of being present for what is. And, as I said earlier, when we embrace reality with empty arms, then reality embraces back.

The mind-body is subject to a wide spread of mental/emotional states and energies. The mind conventionally associates these states with the idea that we are feeling more or less "good" or "bad." Right at the middle of this scale of states we may have the state of either "I'm feeling okay" or "I'm feeling a little off." Along the okay scale we may progress to "I'm feeling really good," or even to "transcendently blissful." On the "off" side of the scale we may discern the sensations of minor or acute discomfort, disturbance, worry, and profound unhappiness or despair. We may _feel_ simple well-being, harmony, completeness; or we may _feel_ that a general fault line is running through—and has been running through—our lives.

We further attach a panoply of mental stories to these states that either assign causes for these states or consequences of these states; and that furthermore evaluate, praise, or blame external circumstances or ourselves. The simple and intimate awareness of the state itself is immediately lost in, or confused with, the story; and that story consequently defines our experience or our identity. These states are naturally so powerfully engaging of the mind that it is normally difficult _not_ to define ourselves through them—and through the stories we create around them—and to thus further stimulate these energy states accordingly.

Emotions arise out of a deep fund of life energy; and these energies and emotions are a vital part of our biology and an expression of organic needs. They may direct the organism to certain kinds of activity, whether ultimately functional or dysfunctional. We have the brain/body capacity to naturally resolve these fluid emotional states and to bring them into integrated harmony with the life of the body; but the skills required to integrate these states go largely untaught, so instead we create stories around these states that give them a life of their own.

When we attach stories to our ordinary and changing states, projecting causes, effects, and judgments—and when we then evolve coping strategies based on these stories—we begin to manufacture a powerful virtual reality. We could call it a dream world. This dream world, or waking trance, which we chronically inhabit is characterized by an interweaving of subjective energy states and projected realities. These develop their own causal logic of events and experiences that perpetuate one another into a personal history without any insight into its manufactured quality; and with no awakeness to the spaciousness of our fundamental and all-pervading "empty essence" or to the unconditioned nature of our conscious being.

We may be conscious of our feeling states; or we may only be aware of them as a triggering sensation, labeled and subsumed in the life of the story. Inevitably, new stories and new feeling states arise based on nothing more than old stories. This is one way of speaking of _samsara,_ the wheel of illusory or relativistic existence in which we futilely try to relieve our deep and underlying discomfort through strategies of grasping or resistance within the terms of the dream. All of which further animates the dream.

How do these stories work in our life? In a sense, our simplest stories are our abbreviated and literal representations, i.e. our names for things. When I look at what we normally think of as a chair and think "chair," I have already organized the data of my experience into a package or instant story—a shorthand, we might say—that bypasses any need to actually experience "this chair." Practically speaking, in an everyday sense, it is not really necessary for me to experience everything about _this chair_ in all its dimensions. I do not need to perceive, as William Blake would say, that it is "infinite." I do not need to see "the whole world there," or all that has contributed to its being here, humanly or metaphysically. I only need to know where to sit. The mind is designed to offer us these practical shortcuts, even though a lot of dimension or information gets lost along the way. But as we routinely apply the same story-making shortcut to everything—including to one another, and even to ourselves and to our own feelings—we reduce the rich, infinite, open-ended interrelational world to our simple representations. The Infinite, the divine and open-ended aspect of being, itself becomes a story—or a doctrine. If we believe any story or perception is "fundamental truth" rather than relative or creative truth, we become fundamentalists of reality.

Beyond our simple naming or labeling, the process of story-making is operating in every aspect of our lives. We might say that any way that we structure reality, any way that we organize the data of our personal experience and give it meaning is a story. And that story always ties into an earlier story. I like the use of the word "story" because it reminds us that the way the mind continually structures reality is creative, but not absolute. This is our natural and purposeful human capacity; and this in itself is not the problem. The problem arises within the virtual mental terrain in which we impute narrowly conceived meanings and then live within the confines of these meanings, identifying with them as if they _were_ absolute; as if they were, ipso facto, reality. As if they were more real and more important than our aware being itself.

By assigning absolute reality to what is only representative or virtual reality, our awareness, availability, and flexible responsiveness to the infinite, or undefined, play of reality is restricted. As such, we sacrifice the free and open quality of our awareness, which is now captivated, or entranced, by its own interpretative activity. And, when we use our story-telling capacity to fixate, reinforce, or literalize our own self-involved reality, drama, or picture of the world, we collapse the space in which we can feel, apprehend, and engage experience. We collapse the space in which we can perceive anew, learn, and grow. We collapse the space in which we can collaborate with that which truly supports our lives together. This collapse of the basic space of our existence is the routine basis for our delusion and suffering.

Beyond our names or labels for things and for one another are our beliefs about those things; and beyond our beliefs are our opinions and judgments based on our beliefs—and further historical projections about causes or consequences of what we believe or judge—and appropriate strategies of attack or defense, run to, run at, or run away from. All of that is in the realm of projective story. This realm of story also extends to—or perhaps begins with—our stories about our own feeling sensations, the stories that I attach to good and bad feeling states instead of simply opening my awareness to them. For every human being is, after all, a person with feelings and stories about those feelings—including guilt and blame stories. And so "reality" is constructed.

Our projective story-making capacity is thus intrinsic to our mental functioning; but it is also called into service and easily fixated in response to primal or early childhood experiences of overwhelming or compelling feelings that we were naturally unequipped to handle without attaching a story to them. And this relatively primitive and unreliable mechanism for making sense of our world is still operating. These stories accumulate with each developmental stage. Unless a "greater story" or a liberating experience "initiates" me out of them, I will shrink all experience to the size of my previous childhood story.

What if I permitted myself—in the spirit of my contemplative sitting practice, and in the spirit of this poem—to no longer be governed by the structures of childhood overwhelm, dropped my stories, and used my capacity to _"listen"_ to the world in order to _listen_ again to my own feeling states? To relax in their presence, as Longchenpa would say, before karma is formed. What is the original unconditioned experience coiled within my own emotional sensations if I don't routinely trigger my own meanings and reactions; if I allow my feelings to uncoil energetically in awareness? If I do not act out, dismiss, or withdraw from shame or heartache or anger with the use of words and the stories that go with these words, what is the space that will open for me? Will it open to love or will it stay contracted to "poor me" or "terrible you"?

Understand that states of mind and emotion are occasional, responsive, and insubstantial. Like writing on water, they naturally resolve back to their unconditioned and fluid state. Our _stories_ about those states, however—how "lonely" or "separate" or "unworthy" or "superior" or "mistreated" I am—serve to lock in those states as part of the repertoire of our identity and continue to regenerate them. Therefore, our intrinsic wakefulness, our free awareness or free attention, which in the absence of projection is richly inclusive and multidimensional, has been captivated by these states and identified with limiting structures of the mind—one-sided and one-dimensional representations of reality—and our consciousness dwells within this increasingly elaborated projective world (just as in a dream world), governed by the laws of our conditioning and maintained by projection. You can see that the reversal of this process would be radically liberating.

If I could simply open my awareness, without story, to my feeling states, I could take responsibility for allowing the natural alchemy of their resolution, rather than projecting them outward into a samsaric realm in which no resolution is ever possible. Thus, the Buddha taught that the reversal of this samsaric process occurs as we learn to dis-identify with these concentric rings of representation, and bring our free awareness back to itself. Specifically, we relax our _strategies_ of desire and avoidance that are based on our interpretive stories about past, present, and future; secondly, we relax our _opinions and judgments_ that are based on these interpretations; then we relax our very _identification_ with our stories and interpretations; finally, we relax all our _interpretive stories_ themselves and all interpretive activity about the way things are. We may gradually come back to the immediate sense data and feeling states, to the shades of experience of "I feel good" or "I feel bad." We even drop the short story called "good" and "bad." We become aware of the one who is simply present and experiencing, and then we also drop our ideas about that one.

As we surrender these successive rings of stories that had fully captivated our awareness, we begin to notice the capacity for simple, or naked, awareness itself. Awareness reawakens _to_ awareness itself, that awareness in which all these phenomena arise, but which is no longer reduced or captivated by them. This free awareness now resumes its empty, open-dimensional quality. And this is experienced to be intrinsically fulfilling and revelatory. The heart is now free to function. History is disarmed. Compassion and wisdom blossom together. The cultivation or restoration of original wakefulness through the progressive release of identification with concepts and structures of thought is the meditational activity called in Sanskrit _dhyan,_ which is the root of the Chinese _ch'an_ and Japanese _zen._ As one Chinese ch'an master said, "The perfect way is not difficult for those not stuck on their own stories."

Thus, as one learns to dis-identify with states of experience, and to deconstruct and dis-identify with all the associated stories and meanings, one is able to simply stay present for these states and look them right in the eyes, so to speak. The structures of the dream are dismantled to be used as raw materials for the blaze of consciousness. We begin to pay much less attention to "feeling good" or "feeling bad" or even to distinguishing between them, not from repression of feeling but from a growing equanimity of awareness. It's all so much firewood for the light of consciousness.

This principle is illustrated in the Mahabharata, in the story of Sukhdev Muni, an earnest young seeker who is advised by his father, Ved Vyas, to go to King Janak, a great spiritual adept. Sukhdev is skeptical that a king, a worldly person, would have anything spiritual to offer him. His doubts are removed when, approaching the throne, he is welcomed by King Janak, who is sitting with one leg being massaged by a beautiful woman while his other leg is dangling in a vat of boiling oil.

Psychically it is a bit like that. The extremes of psychic comfort and pain are woven into our psyche; and, as we sit on our meditation cushion, it is our intrinsic wakefulness, distilled from identification with being states, that is able to stay present and welcome the infinite open quality of the present moment in the midst of all that is arising. It is this very process, in fact—the choice to do this—that continues to distill this original wakefulness from the trance of identification and imagery. It is this that leaves us free to shine as what we are, without contracting from "being," without attachment or withdrawal, even in the face of feelings "I don't want to feel."

If we believe we can accomplish this detached awakeness by simply thinking about it or believing in it, it is a bit like thinking we can train for the Olympics simply by believing in them. The intention to remain awake must be accompanied by training in wakefulness as a ruling priority in our lives. Life itself, of course, is the ultimate training ground, the opportunity to choose again and again to return to fresh awareness in each moment of experience. Sitting meditation, however, is the gymnasium, or the field, where such training may be most deliberate and most supported. When we sit, there is only our awareness, our experience, and our choice about how to relate to our experience. All the variables and distractions are simplified so that we may more easily observe the mind and its processes of identification and projection; and so that we may continue to practice choosing, instant by instant, whether to identify with the stories and structures of the mind or whether to abide simply in that awareness that is lovingly present.

As we do so, we are activating and creating new neural circuitry in the prefrontal lobes of the brain, that part of the brain that mediates pure choice and untrammeled awareness. The neural activity in the prefrontal lobes may become involved with the earlier instinctive conditioning of the primitive brain, the imagery and emotional attachments of the midbrain, or the rationalizations of the forebrain—or it is capable of simply remaining open to the immediate and unconditioned fields of awareness, empty of projections. As such—as we choose to do this—we are participating, in "real time," in unfolding the evolutionary potential of our conscious being.

To repeat, from the point of view of our relative conditioning, all of our mental states and the experience of good or bad take on a substantial reality that brings a fixated quality to our experience that we define ourselves with. If, however, our awareness is not identified with these fixations, then all these changing states may simply be tasted as the varying flavors of reality. Hence, as I wrote in an earlier poem, "moods or their absence are the same wine."

When I sit down to meditate in the morning I am often aware of energies along the "bad" to "good" scale, and pretty much take it to be the wine of the moment. Sometimes the weather of my consciousness is so relaxed and empty and spacious that sitting is just a matter of falling from emptiness into emptiness, with everything included in a big smile. One needn't identify, or become entranced with, these pleasurable states, which, though greatly comfortable and spacious, are not liberating in themselves. That is, they are not the point. In the context of meditation these easeful states are a fortuitous opportunity not for complacency, but for deepening our active surrender into the fire of awareness without self, a moment by moment opportunity to ante up everything—to remain homeless, so to speak—and thereby avoid the static satisfaction that zen would call the cave of demons.

Sometimes, however, I sit down in the morning with great _discomfort._ The stormy ocean currents of mind have tossed up any manner of troubling sensations to the surface, including profound grief about my life or about the nature of life itself. Or perhaps it is a deep vein of separation experienced as a fundamental sense of failure. This capacity to feel separation, sadness, or failure—this profound existential suffering—is fundamental to the human condition, although the relative events and moods of our lives may leave us more vulnerable or less vulnerable to this suffering, or more or less aware of it, at any given moment. And, of course, much of the agenda of our human activity is devoted to avoiding it or distracting ourselves from it.

But sometimes it is unavoidable. At a certain point in our practice there is no longer the least tendency to avoid this profound grief or suffering, nor to dramatize it, but only to welcome it into the fire of conscious being. We are now free to engage with love the depth, dimensions, and subtleties of our own feeling states. And as mature humans we are responsible for doing just that. Otherwise they will remain unconscious and unattended, and dramatized in our approach to others and in our approach to God. Put in other words, our unattended or resisted feeling states retain a solidity and a defining influence in our lives; whereas, inspected and embraced, they are—however daunting—mere shadows to disappear in the light of our love and consciousness, our true being.

_Just_ sitting means just sitting as what we are, embracing and inhabiting all of it beyond light and shadow. Otherwise we are not just sitting, we are shrinking. And that shrinking, or contracting away from the fullness of being, gives rise to our endless round of "birth and death." As we open our feeling attention and fully embrace our emotional substrates, and as we drop the more superficial labels or self-stories, the undertones of the emotions may become increasingly primal: aloneness, abandonment, betrayal, failure, separateness; vulnerability and feeling endangered. The more primal the emotions become, the more powerfully transformative. This is because our willingness to simply stay present and take the time to fully embrace them in consciousness is tantamount to embracing and hence obviating the very underpinnings of our own mechanisms of fear and separation. As these emotional structures melt in our intimate embrace, the primordial and inherently ecstatic energy of being is freed to arise in its essential aspect.

The beauty of sitting, then, to come back to the poem, is that these states of being that normally captivate us—even the most profound states of separation, grief, or failure—those states that seem to "break" us, and yet, in so doing, are already beginning to illuminate our underlying truth or potentiality—stretch before our awareness as occasions for great intimacy. Not to be avoided nor to be identified with, but to be engaged with the relish of a waiting lover, with whom a transcendent communion is possible. Or like one of the great cats—these creatures of supreme fluency, grace, and power—and danger—whose growl, even whose purr, sounds like a rumble from the very heart of our created world, challenging us to join with the fluid dance of being, and to not fixate, objectify, or withhold ourselves.

Then that very core experience of separation or failure—now a lover inviting us to plunge—burns with the transforming fire of intimacy and surrender. And the great rain of ecstatic union arrives from beyond the reaches of the mind and its polarities, across infinite space.

# If He Is True

If he is a true pleasure-seeker

let him track one of these little wandering

woodland streams. Glory! I would sooner

give my life to one of these than to

pursue a thousand years in my

sweet dream.

If he is a true praise-singer

let him pause where falling water speaks

with flashing tongues. I have heard

this song and seen her lissome body

rising in new corn and the first

squash blossom.

If he is a faithful lover

let him wake when first light crackles

the topmost needles of the pine, and gather a

wet blossom and a piece of bone

to return to the flowing lady, and offer

up a love song of his own.

# Commentary: "If He Is True"

## 1

In this old poem, the woodland stream is the delight of unfolding mystery. It calls to our ears with unmatchable music. Every twist of the stream, every stone, every falling drop of water making its way over and down its natural watercourse is dancing with the delight of life and of life's mysterious source. It resonates with everything that is alive in us. May we be called to choose it every time.

In the agriculture, industry, and economics of the civilized world, water is treated as a resource and a commodity to be diverted, obstructed, polluted, depleted, enslaved, merchandised, and otherwise stolen. There is no greater indication of our gross unconsciousness and alienation from the true life that lives us than our failure to behold, honor, and serve this goddess, water, who is the miraculous infusion and support of all life. (Of course our same unconsciousness extends to the soil, to animals, and so forth.) There is no more essential example of the self-centered greed and ignorance by which our civilized minds have proven incapable of recognizing our mutuality with the holy earth. There is no true pleasure in this distortion of our relationship to the earth. Just a terrifying dream of exploitation and separation; a dream of pleasure without pleasure; comfort without true comfort; convenience without true convenience; profit without true profit.

If he is a true pleasure seeker, let him return to friendship with the natural watercourse. Let him track, let him trust, let him entrain with the story that speaks to us about our life together. Glory! says the poem. I would sooner turn my life over to the sweetness of the stream than to pursue forever my projections and dreams, the false sweetness of my separated pursuits and pleasures.

This poem is not about a bucolic holiday or a romantic infatuation. It is about our only possible mature sustainability as a species. It is about recognizing the divine nature of the uncolonized world to be the source and sustainer of everything we colonize, everything we have directed to our human ends (whether smartly or stupidly). That same water arises in the corn—the fruit of that marriage of the wild and millennia of human selection and ingenuity. That same wild formative nature of being rises in our long domesticated squash blossom. And our very bones, no less than that blossom, are born of that stream (river, ocean) and will return to that stream. And if we are true praise-singers, pleasure-seekers, and lovers, we will not "take the money and run," but daily turn our life back over to the stream, energetically returning the fruits of that stream, and of our own human ingenuity, back to its source. We will offer back our lives as a love song of our own creation.

Returning a blossom is to acknowledge that our food comes from Her; the bone—which I think of as a carved bone—is an offering back of the work of our hands—or it may represent offering back a piece of our own living, our "bones," which have been carved by our own experiences of life. That is the sustaining sweetness. And I am not offering a spiritual allegory here. I am talking about the earth we live on and how we live on it. The poem in its few words tells a kind of simple story. It is a way of assembling an understanding, as all stories do. But it is a story meant to counter the habitual stories of our separateness. And there is a great story tradition that does just that.

I have already just spoken in the last commentary of our egoic story-making, by which we reduce the rich, open-ended, interrelational world to our self-serving representations; by which we maintain our beliefs and identities and reify our emotional life. The same egoic story-making is true of us when we create a fundamentalist identity for our tribe, nation, or community. It is true of a culture—of a civilization—when it sees itself as more special than the cycles of life itself; when it presumes to "own" (or, for that matter, "disown") the world. When our self-serving stories define our reality or our subsequent reactive or dismissive states, we leave no space for the sacred, which is not of our minds, but which lies in the natural watercourse and in the undefined potential of each moment. The sacred manifests all about us as the natural world (although to call it the "natural world" is like calling simple, real food "health food") and the regenerative forces of the earth, when we approach it with humility and mutuality rather than dominion.

This human encounter with the sacred has also, for endless millennia, been held in trust for human beings within the realm of Story. The _sacred,_ or non-egoic, function of story, which I would like to address here, is to lead us _back_ into that interrelational world and out of the world of private or cultural abbreviations of meaning. For the story I impose upon the world is not the only story. By contrast, there is also a story the world _speaks to me_ when I am simply receptive. When we pause to listen, all of the elements of the natural world, and even the objects of our human manufacture, are telling us their story. And the world communicates its truths to us not only out of the immediacy of awareness but also out of a deep well of metaphorical meaning that can be life-giving, even sacred.

I speak of metaphor here not in the sense of an artistic contrivance, but rather metaphor as a process in consciousness, a truth, a _mythopoesis,_ a domain of seeing and of languaging that has its own authority, a way of communicating the reality of things that is other than the literal; because the real can never be reduced to the literal. The story is not meant to be _solidified_ by the fundamentalist mind into its literal meaning nor _translated_ by the rational mind into its rational meaning. The meaning is already fluid and whole within the realm of the story itself.

Thus there is also a Story, as my studies with Martín Prechtel have helped me to more deeply appreciate, that rises out of a living and indigenous poetic faculty that unfolds, reveals, and preserves the complex life of things. This is _story_ that links us to a rich well of subconscious truth fed by the long-underground rivers of collective human culture and experience; and that is always in danger of being lost, dismissed, flattened, and trivialized by the imperial, commercial, and one-dimensional momentum of modern culture. _The indigenous story is always emptying the individual self, or the personality's story, so that we may remember an older "story," a more inclusive story—a universal but earth-based story to which we fully owe our lives, and that, in turn, asks something of us._

This finds cultural expression in true art or true myth; or with those indigenous and living stories that serve not to collapse, but to _hold open_ space in our lives, and in our consciousness, for complex metaphorical reality; stories that connect us to our ground, to an understanding of our participation in the whole, and to our own processes of growth. These stories—lived as life—find expression in the poetic and intuitive genius of a people so that life doesn't become short-changed by our own abbreviations. These are the stories that were spilled forth in the beginning across oblivion—as, for example, Mayan tradition tells it, by the one-legged dancing fire god—and which gave birth to all people, places, and times; and which are reignited by our human tellings. That is to say, these stories _are_ the very life of things. And they arise as a language of the spirit, which, like any language deliberately and well-spoken, can shift our sensibilities into the world of spirit, the world of presence, the world of connection.

When we share these stories, when we open to these stories, when we are in the presence of a true story-teller or poet, and when we are exposed to a languaging that has not divested itself of complex interconnectedness, we feel the richness, diversity, and mystery of life expanding in us in a way that bypasses the literal mind. For when the _world was spoken_ —as its own miraculous story—the things of the world themselves became the words that even now we can listen to without adding words of our own. That is the living story as it is handed down to us—as it spills from the bucket of the one-legged dancing fire god—and is even now expressed and reflected in all the vicissitudes of life on this flowering earth.

When we relax the inner, self-centered dialogue, we recognize that we always exist within a field of communication. Something is always telling its story. Buddhism refers to the "five excellences," the wonderful occasion of the coming together of the teacher (or communicator), the student (or listener), the message, the time, and the place. That phrase may be taken traditionally as celebrating the rare good fortune of being in the presence of a Buddha. The deeper perception is that every time and place is a point of communication or transmission on that infinite mandala of wisdom that transcends our ideas of conscious or unconscious, human or not human, samsara or nirvana. Every occasion is the occasion of the five excellences. And we may ultimately get to play any part on that mandala. We are the ground, and we are the story. But we also exist _within_ the ground and _within_ the story. Earth is our unique ground and our unique story. And, for most practical purposes, we would do best to begin as the listener.

Listening to the earth awakens our primary belonging. Just as our capacity for attunement to people gets wired into us with the earliest connection to the eyes of the mother, our capacity for attunement to the land gets wired in the first time we truly open to her and feel her eyes on us; and it matures through commitment and consistency of relationship. Then we are no longer passing through territory. We are no longer tourists or exploiters. Some part of us must be given back each time we are present with her, because that attunement is now part of our own being.

Untutored as I am in my own indigenous ground, still when I listen to the stories of the world around me each story opens into a larger story that ultimately links my consciousness to the story of the universe, the story of origins, the story of all beings. Everything opens up into its interbeing with everything else, thus promoting an indigenous and humble awakeness. It is awakeness to the intelligence and the authority of all things to speak for themselves, and an awakeness to our interdependence. That is why I consider it incumbent upon myself to enter into the landscape, to walk out into the woods every day I can, or into the marshes—into the communities of green and hopping life—not as a tourist, but to receive my marching papers, as it were. To ask to be restored to the Story that only they can tell me, and that they have been speaking since the beginning of memory. To ask regularly of the trees what it is that they would have me know, what it is that they would have me speak, and how it may take form in my life; and to feel their root life connected to the wisdom of all trees.

I don't mean I am there to acquire new descriptive information or answers that I can now own and apply rationally or authoritatively. It is more about opening to a subjective understanding that dissolves the walls of my exclusiveness. When I "ask of the trees," it is a process of receptivity and relationship that is itself the beginning of an "answer." It is to appreciate and to acknowledge the living, conscious beings of nature as authoritative spokespersons for the very mystery of being and creation—for the fluid dance of all life out of the unknown realm that is the endless growth and renewal of all things in the realm of earth, the microbial dance of nurture and decay, the life of our cells and of our own stories, and of our own capacity to see and hear and desire.

Is this the allegiance I feel when I walk into the woods; that I felt long ago when I offered my life to the stream? It is a fundamental allegiance that often leaves me shaken and transfixed and obedient. I enter it as a realm of submission—neither to "my" story nor to the absence of story—but to the great story, always mysterious, unknown, ungraspable, which nevertheless _grasps us_ and holds us suspended in its power—the power of tree, wind, and stream; the power of desert and rock; the power of the ant. It is the gaping doorway of the numinous in all manifest earth. And it is a family relationship that is primal. There is an alive intelligence at the heart of creation, operating on all scales. There are extended chains of galaxy clusters unfolding in a tree; and the observable macro-galaxies themselves are spread out along the veins of a vaster tree—although scale itself, vast and minute, is a relative illusion. We are each embodiments—and yet sons and daughters—of that alive intelligence. So although "not other than," we nonetheless bow down with respect to the ancient authority, the sometimes parental authority, even the divine authority manifesting at the heart of the created world.

That creative authority has been integral to a call and response between all the orders of creation and the evolving human spirit, leading to a great legacy, a great body of poetry or story that has emerged as we humans have learned—in our different thought systems and languaging—to understand in part the essential dynamics of co-emergent being, consciousness in humans co-evolving with consciousness inherent in the creation. Our indigenous cultures have largely co-evolved with the greater story to incorporate a remembrance of our primary relationship and reciprocity with the story of all things. Their living rituals of remembrance serve as a continual corrective to the self-involved and projective capacities of our human minds for veering off into creating our own projective screens of relative and self-centered meanings, and abbreviations of meaning, placed between ourselves and the greater story.

I am dumbfounded when I look at the depth of my own layers of rational, self-centered meanings—personal, scientific, philosophical—ratified by my culture and civilization, the depth of the layers of forgetting that distance me—that distance all of us—from what would otherwise be the most obvious and compelling reality: that everything is giving its life for us; that the life of our bodies and of our next breath derive from all these intelligent and generous forces of creation, heavenly and earthly, fire and water, that sustain this world; and that all the plant world and the animal world is continuously offering its life that we humans may be fed and sustained. If we were all so aware, our hearts would be constantly and ecstatically broken with the generosity and grief and beauty of all this sacrifice. And we would not be virtually numb to this debt and proceed as if life were our own clever show to succeed or fail at; or as if all of this immense life that feeds my life is just an unconscious, taken for granted, exploitable resource or mechanism for the wondrous, privileged free ride of being insatiably human, preoccupied with our personal needs, fantasies, and ambitions.

Can that ever be other than a dangerous limb for a person or a civilization to walk out on—that limb that cuts itself off from its own tree of life? That leafs out and flowers for its own self-image and goals rather than for the life of the tree? Will that not always leave us somewhat desperate? The life of the Tree is the Great Story. And it is the great story we have walked away from; the great story that was still addressed and told over and over, in one form or another, in intact indigenous cultures. And we may always have a certain longing—and, in fact, a certain personal choice that is naturally difficult in the wake of the immense wave of personal and cultural forgetting; a certain foolish and naive and beautiful choice—to put our remembrance and our indebtedness to this Story, and a way of making an offering back to the Story, ahead of all the "sophisticated," "rational," and alienated goals and meanings that propel our civilization.

I am no folklorist, mythologist, or anthropologist. More important, I am not born of an indigenous or genuine story culture. So I speak with limited knowledge of stories. And my hands and my body only dimly carry the rituals of the living earth. What I can more naturally speak of here, from my own experience, is that growing truth of relationship that can allow the Great Story to speak through our many stories, to sustain our many stories and then be sustained by them. It is a truth in which the notion of the "I"—or of the human species—as being the exclusive or dominant reality is left far behind. And I suspect that this is what all true, or indigenously based, stories have ultimately to tell us—and we may learn it gently or we may learn it harshly: and that is that _it is mutuality, not identity, that is the actual unit of being; and that apart from that mutuality there is no sustainable balance or sanity._ They also tell us that the world is more mysterious than known, and that the world colonized by our civilized human mind must live in humble and mutual relationship to the wild or uncolonized world. And that our species' sanity and sustainability on the earth also depends on this.

## 2

This commentary arose initially as a nagging counterpoint within the body of the last commentary; obviously a seed cross-pollinated by the winds of my study with Martín Prechtel. I could not write one-sidedly about the transcendence of story without also acknowledging the vital embrace of story. As this was a growing edge of integration, I wrestled for a year and then for many intense weeks with the story itself, unsure about what truth I knew to speak and whether it was mine to speak. I returned again and again to the forest, making offerings and walking especially in rambling and intimate stretches of a woods that first placed its hold on me some years ago, and that now continues to siphon off something of my human life into itself, leaving me more innocent and disoriented in the face of something Other. I knew that the speaking was beyond me, and not mine to speak alone.

Though bounded and relatively tame in this time and place, the forest is still true to the genes of its wild nature. It always has something up its sleeve. It occupies a space unbounded by its acreage, and manages to draw me into deeper mystery. It is my benefactor and teacher, knowing my human pretensions. Even though I always approach with a sense of mystery, I nevertheless bring my civilized mind with me. Even when I enter with a seeming humility, the forest washes through me with a tender reproach; like an ancient martial artist who can disarm an assailant with no apparent movement and without losing her smile. I am love-raided at the moment of my own aggression. Then tears may flow with the simultaneous experience of exile and homecoming.

The forest is patient with the flare-up of my human presumptions, such as my passion to map the lay of the land or forge a connecting trail between two favorite points—but blessedly contrives to bring me back repeatedly into the warm and enlightening embrace of being completely lost, and thus truly present to the forest again. Perhaps the day I have no longer succeeded, in spite of myself, in becoming completely lost will simply indicate the day the woods have lost interest in me and have thus abandoned me to my own cleverness. I saw that my writing in this instance—forging a trail and becoming completely lost—was mirrored in my experience in the woods.

One day I find myself spending long hours deep in the forest, just sitting in the pouring rain under a protective hemlock bough. Then, in the early hours of the next morning, I am given a dream.

I am approached by a man who offers me a job. He is creating a universe—an earth, actually—manifesting a whole planetary world into life out of the latent power of empty space. I see this earth before me and see that it includes six conscious human beings. The man is concerned, however, that these beings, suddenly awakened from radical space to radical form, and gazing out at the blank wall of form itself, will become disoriented and terrified without a story of who they are and where they come from. He offers me a job—a very honorable position of co-creation—first to supply the story that would serve them, at least in a long-term interim way, for the time it took them to fully expand and integrate their own understanding. Second, I am to see to the arrangements for having the earth itself carry the story, so that earth itself serves as a continual reference and support whenever they look or listen; that earth would be none other than the story itself. In this way the humans and the earth would be part of a collaborative story leading to recognition of the story itself as a fully embodied equivalent with the originating truth of radical time and space. Thus there appears to be no hierarchy of value between any piece of the story and its radical, or ultimate, source. Every piece of the story is a doorway into the vast intimacy of being. And every piece of the earth is a doorway into the story.

The playful gift of the dream, and its liminal after-state, was to invite me into a greater intimacy and conversance with the story that I otherwise experienced from the side of the sincere and witless wanderer in the woods; to see from the side of creation the secret of the vast power of deer, rock, raven, or tree to carry the story and to call to me so strongly. When I only listen or look, when I only relax into mutuality, every living being of the earth—and there are only living beings—is the eye-way or ear-way into the divine energies of creation and our own place within them. The story was becoming my own.

## 3

Stories bring the Great Story into our homes and fields, our kitchen and fireplace. They show us the world as a field of relationship at a level at which we can participate. They allow us to be at home. They transform our seeing in exchange for our offering up the mind's rational separation and standoffishness. That standoffishness makes us feel like rational adults, when in fact we behave like untaught children—not having even the common politeness to say hello, goodbye, thank you, or would you like a beer to that which is speaking to us.

Now let me tell you a bit about that one-legged dancing fire god I mentioned in passing. And this is just the very little I've gleaned from random tellings, like a little child excited to share what he's overheard. And who knows what he's understood or remembers correctly? I may not know how the pieces all fit, and I may be making it up. But you were there too, and you can correct me. There was a time, and perhaps you remember it better than I do, when everything was still all dark. And he lived quite happily with his good wife, and had all that he needed, alongside the waters of oblivion—you know, the ones we carefully avoid, out of which the crocodiles of oblivion are continuously leaping up and snapping their oblivious jaws. But on the other side of those waters was fire, and he was determined to bring some back. Well, he had to leap pretty high to avoid those crocodiles. But when he leapt back carrying that full bucket of fire and all, his left leg was caught by one of those crocodiles, and as he pitched forward he spilled that bucket of fire. And the sparks of that fire were actually all of the stories that went hurtling through the void to become the stories of all things. And those are the stories that made us.

Well, he's a one-legged dancer now. And the stump of his left leg just stays in place as that heaven-earth axis that runs right through the North Star; and his dancing around it on his right leg keeps the world turning and all the stories spinning. And Old Man Fire himself still shows up among us in all his many faces, sometimes chained to the dynamos of our civilization—if he can really be chained. But he can certainly be taken for granted. We've learned to summon him with the turn of a knob or the strike of a match. But there was a time when we had to work hard to welcome his first spark into the circle among us—that spark that is so necessary to our lives. And we didn't forget him then. Sitting together around the fire, which gives us warmth and light and food, the stories naturally welled up in us and had to be told; for they were the gift of Old Man Fire. And, when you have your next opportunity to make his acquaintance in this way, when he jumps up and appears to you, I am told that he is especially fond of chocolate—which I'm sure is a whole other story—and it would be gracious of you to offer him some. And not just Hershey's kisses either, but that good boutique eighty-five percent cacao bar you just spent so much money for. Say to the old man, "Thanks for coming among us once again, Old Man. It's good to see your face today." And take some time to remember his long journey—as well as our own—and the blessing it is that he always shows up for us.

But this one who first brought back fire, this dancing fire god, why did he do it in the first place, Martín once asked. After all, he was perfectly whole and happy living alone with his beloved. Why did he bother to risk leaping over the ocean of oblivion to bring back fire? (And here, dear reader, you can take your eyes off the paper a minute and try to answer that question for yourself, as we did.) Because, Martín said at last, he loved his wife but he never got to see her because it was all darkness. He wanted to see the one he loved.

The answer, so simple, thrilled me at the time. Is there any more eloquent story, I thought; anything more elegant among those sophisticated theologies that understand the primordial one, God, that one who is inherent intimacy and love, creating the world out of a desire to see and know itself, to know and be known, to bring into display the nature of love and its full creative expression. Because this old man wanted to actually see his wife, his beloved, everything came into being. And we can be reminded of this story every day, in the middle of our lives, by someone we can see and remember and thank every time he jumps up; someone with whom we can share a bar of chocolate, and let the world come alive again, and restore our primary relationships, and remember the old stories, and feel our indebtedness as a sign of being at home in the universe.

## 4

All spiritual systems seem to posit an ultimate reality, with either monistic or pluralistic flourishes to their poetry. For Buddhism it is simply the underlying ground of our experience, the open space that continues to be the reality of all phenomena, all stories, yet never confined to any of the ways we reduce the Inconceivable Story to personal form, identity, belief, concept, fundamentalism, or fixation to partial views, such as enlightened or not enlightened, sacred or profane, relative or absolute, one or many, existing or non-existing, story or no story. The Original Awakeness of being, beyond all stories, Samantabhadra, is married to Infinite Fecundity, Universal Appearance, the feminine manifestation of all stories, all experience, all possibilities, as the other side of its own nature. They lie in eternal embrace, like the husk and the ear. Together they are the corn that supports life; that supports all poetry. Together the beloved may be seen.

The great Tibetan teacher Tsongkhapa reaffirmed the principle that it is this apparent suffering world of sentient beings as we know it, the world in which the beloved is seen, this world that demands and calls forth our compassion, this realm of the Goddess, not some independent realm of enlightenment, that is the primary and compelling reality. There is no enlightenment that is a masculine end-run around the Goddess. When our wisdom arrives at the door of the infinite Samantabhadra, he says, "Nice going. Now go back and know _Her._ For my beloved is an equal part of me. Our love does not conform to any of your human hierarchies or dualisms. Her story is not your petty stories. It is the story of our reciprocity."

So the other movement of wisdom is the embrace of the embodied world, which is also the embrace of our own completeness as Samantabhadra. It is manifest in the way I listen to you; in the way I place a cup on the table, or pass the butter, or plant a seed, or say a prayer. It is the joy of the fire god to be able to see his own wife. It is the maturation of our humanity and the maturation of our capacity for reciprocal relationship: to our partners and to our neighbors; to the dark and to the light side of the moon; to the sovereignty of the land and its own voices of wisdom; to our ancestors and to the generations to come. It is to take our place at the awakened heart of the world.

For myself, the practice of just sitting allows me to open to that awake presence that underlies my mental phenomena and that has no bounds. Yet when I sit with a tree, I am not just sitting with awake presence, I am sitting with Tree. Tree is the complete expression. Tree has its own story to tell. This wisdom of the land that roots me in rapt submission—the very change in the quality of the air that allows the literal mind to surrender and embrace an intimate and commanding reality—is not simply "awake presence" speaking. It is the Goddess speaking—whose husband is awake presence. Yet this simple submission to Her is also the Great Way of Emptiness, or Openness, whose dharma family numbers infinite beings, all in service to one another. Earth is the manifestation of all these beings. And the Buddha-path is not divorced from earth.

When the Buddha lay famished and dying, it was the goddess in the form of dairy maid who gave him the sustenance to complete his path. When the Buddha awakened to the inherent perfection in all things, he called on the earth to bear witness. When he was gathered in assembly with a myriad of buddhas and bodhisattvas, the Lotus Sutra tells us, and wanted someone to bear witness to wisdom, he chose to call into the circle the young daughter of the Naga king. The Nagas are serpent beings who govern the watery realm of the planet. It is they we offend with our pollution, obstruction, or depletion of the natural watercourse. And this young girl's awakened wisdom astonished them all.

The story of the living world is, paradoxically, story as the very play of _prajnaparamita;_ story in the service of receptivity, leaving us not fixed and literal, but marvelously empty and appreciative, and open to mystery. Just as the _self_ may open on behalf of a selfless intimacy, just so, when the great story—the great myth, the great poem—is lived on behalf of others and the web of life, when the story is lived in the service of the Goddess herself, then there is no limiting, binding, or self-absorbed aspect to the story. It is _sacred story._

But when this receptive and open principle of story is colonized by the objectifying and controlling mechanisms of the mind, then story as a way of listening to the world is replaced by story as a way of structuring our self-centered window on the world, taking experience out of the realm of the receptive, the fluid, and the relational, and into the realm of the fixed, the objective, and the literal. This controlling orientation of the mind, tending to separate us from the sacred intimacy of the creation, is reinforced in our civilization by the inherited image of a fixed, objective, and literal masculine God standing outside His creation. Whereas, when we remember the goddess, reawakening our love relationship to her, we are recognizing a principle of feminine embodiment, a life-fulfilling eros manifesting through, and encouraging our own faithfulness to, the reciprocal cycles of growth and transformation that support the living unity, diversity, and mutuality of life on earth.

The mystical Jewish tradition speaks endearingly of the _Shekinah,_ God's consort, and the feminine presence of God on earth. In one understanding, it is through her that God is also in exile on the earth; and the sparks of the original divine flame are scattered among all discrete things and circumstances. When we bring mindful attention and praise to each act of living, and to each object in our path, we liberate thereby—moment by moment, and only in these moments—the indwelling divine spark in each object to be restored to its original or underlying unity. This intentional remembrance and participation is thus a spiritual requirement of human beings, although it is not a task that we are capable of completing alone.

Martín Prechtel is himself an inheritor of one of the great stories of the Tzutujil Maya, recounted near the beginning of his book _Stealing Benefacio's Roses_ that depicts how the universally beloved goddess is ultimately dismembered, owing to our own human acts of amnesia, and her bones scattered among all living things, who cling to her bones dearly and in grief as their only remembrance of Her. Her forgetful human consort is told that if he has any hope of restoring her, he must first learn to feed the creation; he must court every living creature, every plant and animal, having first learned the nature of each and what each loves, in order to woo back her bones with gifts and special words of praise. And even after regathering her bones, he must gamble with the Lords of Death for the return of her heart.

That such a tale can be told in an indigenous setting, and placed in a mythic time before ours, tells us that our tendency to disregard and to forget our primary relations is a human tendency, not just the product of industrial civilization. But it is only our indigenous self that remembers to tell it. Such stories must shake our consciousness and awaken us to our current existential situation and our personal choices. Though the hero's task in the tale is of mythic proportion, and he may not succeed, we must at least pause to consider what it is asking of us in our own lives. When in our human and civilized sleep we forget, dishonor (and forget that we forget and dishonor), and psychically dismember the integrity of the Goddess, or of the earth, we perpetuate that amnesia that allows the narcissistic accumulation of comfort, and the narcissistic manipulation of concepts—and hence of the world—to take precedence in our awareness over our capacity to pay attention, and over the direct experience and celebration of interdependent reality, in which we might still have heard the earth speaking to us and remembered how to feed Her.

## 6

As we lose (or destroy) our connectedness to the earth, our self-centered meanings come to play out a long, separative, and forgetful psychic and cultural history upon the face of the planet, fueling, and fueled by, the unconscious momentum of our technological cleverness and our commercialism, of our power and greed. Amidst our sincerest human strivings we have managed to arrive at the endgame of a civilization that is founded on the unsustainable exploitation of the land, and that continues to flatten our consciousness to the full implications of our civilized assumptions of forever transforming the earth.

For this reason I find it neither quaint nor regressive to be earth-rooted in our lives and in our spirituality. Because of the profound alienation of modern culture and the flattening of our stories, as well as of our relationship to the earth, it may be insufficient, even a form of dissociation, only to speak, as I have elsewhere, of "awakening from our projective stories into immediate awareness or awake presence"—unless that presence is mature enough to see into our indebtedness to the web of life. The realization of our spaciousness and fullness of being, transcending our self-centeredness, is, of course, a welcome movement in consciousness; not only for itself, but, after all, from what other ground can true listening occur? From what other ground can renunciation of self-centered assumptions—or healthy and insightful self-correction—occur? From what other ground can we find a non-addictive basis for the hard choices; especially if we have no stories and no initiation restoring true understanding? From what other ground can we have a prayer of detaching from our presumptions and demands; from the tightly wound knot of our addiction, pseudo-convenience, and the long-term unsustainability and destructiveness of our "too big to fail" civilization and its self-hypnotic and self-justifying universe of discourse?

However, awakening into spacious being may or may not in itself tutor us in our relational responsibilities on the earth. And we need both. As long as we are human beings on this planet we also need a way of seeing into our systemic destruction of intimate, mutually sustainable living systems (and cultures) on this planet, and the accumulated layers of sleep of our civilized minds. Hopefully we are finding new paths of awakening to our responsibilities. But we may also need the support of the traditions, the stories, and the teachers who can help _grow us up_ into being consciously indebted and responsible participants in a vast interlocking ecology.

Thus it is also important, and we need more than ever from a human cultural standpoint, to celebrate those stories—those mythic transmissions from the natural world—that are indigenous and life-giving. And, as the Prevailing Culture of the day extends a manufactured one-size-fits-all story upon all cultures—with political, economic, and spiritual consequences—these _living_ stories, stories that arose from our relationship to the living systems of the planet, have helped to hold open a space in the mind—and in the lives of a people—that has protected the _sacred root_ of an intact relationship to the land—a cultural and spiritual intactness—from colonization and conquest, cultural and commercial degradation, or the onslaught of literalist thinking, all of which, alas, now pretty much carries the day.

As that _root_ has been severed, now and repeatedly in human experience, different kinds of stories arise. And these stories change function, as Martín Prechtel explains, focusing now on the maintenance not of a true connectedness, but of a new compensatory exclusiveness, a tribal, national, or ethnic identity already alienated from its true root. Here fundamentalism begins. And here we see the legacy of our own history. These stories that separate people from people arise, in part, from a history of undigested and suppressed grief, separation, and loss as we all, as various peoples, have been uprooted from our land and have uprooted others in turn; maintaining at the last an imperial and technological alienation from the soil.

In this regard the cultural and the individual dynamic correspond. Interestingly, both Sigmund Freud and the Buddha would agree, each in his own way, that the separative activity of the ego, and the development of an absolute and exclusive identity, grows out of a dynamic of separation, loss, denial, and compensation. What loss? The loss of connection to origins; the loss of reciprocal relationship; the loss of the "Mother"; the loss of Original Self or Original Mind; the loss of ecstatic union; the loss, if you will, of the direct experience of God or the direct experience of the Goddess. What compensation? The compensation of a fixed and abiding identity to define ourselves by; the compensation of a fixed and reified view of the world; the compensation of the various prevailing strategies of avoidance, domination, exploitation, accumulation, and judgment. But, say both Freud and the Buddha: these strategies all have an underbelly of sorrow or suffering.

Our healing entails the re-integration of the poetry of our origins and the poetry of our connectedness to times before and beyond our own. And our stories can serve that re-integration. This includes the remembrance of the long and forgotten wanderings of our ancestors, their incredible wisdom and unknown strengths and gifts, their profound and unknown struggles and compromises, and all the ways they adapted to survive that even now affect who we are. It includes the remembrance of our origins in the land itself, and of our last ancestral intact relationship to it. And it includes remembrance of our origins in all the formative forces of creation and transformation that give rise to our existence and still ask our mindfulness and reciprocal engagement. _But we must push past the mind of fundamentalism,_ which in its loss and separation reifies and literalizes the story in order to own it; and in order to control the flow of life rather than to love and honor it. And we must recognize our roots in our common soils. This will also allow us to find our origins in that essential and ecstatic being that is always true of us.

Derrick Jensen once said that the best way he could think of to tell whether or not a story is true was whether he could live with it for 12,500 years without destroying the land he lived on. Historically, the further our myths and stories wander from reawakening our equal and life-affirming participation in natural earth cycles—that is, the further they wander from the indigenous relationship that brought them forth—the more they are instead brought into the service of strengthening new or existing economic and power structures, or of reifying historical grievances and separation. All of which seem to have a way of destroying the land. In this day when all cultural, economic, and technological forces move us outward in endless diaspora from the sacred within our hearts and the sacred beneath our feet, encouraging us to abandon the spiral myths of the holy earth for the linear myths of the holy market, we are challenged to find not new fundamentalisms, but new ways of remembering and re-asserting our integral sanity with the earth. New ways of outgrowing our compensations. New ways of planting our seeds and planting our feet. New ways of recognizing Her in Her sustaining gifts. New ways of singing our song back to the ground on which we stand. Even as we awaken our hearts to spacious being, to conscious loving presence, to the sacred freedom and responsibility of this moment.

 Aside from my own subjective experience as recorded, any insight that may emerge here from my own discussion of the nature and function of story is traceable to Martín Prechtel, and my own assimilation of his teaching, which, in turn, grows out of many dimensions of understanding beyond my awareness. Any limitation or idiosyncrasy in how I understand, express, or spin it here is all my own. If you would like an authoritative understanding of the profound and integral role of story in an intact culture, I enthusiastically refer you to the writings of Martín, available from this publisher, including his beautiful depiction of the living poetry of custom, ritual, and initiation in an intact Mayan culture, _Long Life, Honey in the Heart;_ and his multilayered discussion of a traditional Mayan story, _The Disobedience of the Daughter of the Sun._

# Make No Mistake

Make no mistake. The self

we mistrust we project everywhere,

seeking its salvation,

tracking up the four quarters.

Only in perfect self-reliance

is there self-forgetfulness;

and such trust is

nourished in the garden

of ever-present humiliation.

Standing in the ruination of dreams

we are ever at ease.

# Commentary: "Make No Mistake"

The self we mistrust, the self we fail to embrace, is the self of our own fundamental being, the self of our own emptiness, the self that has no stake in the relative images of self that arise. But nor do we truly embrace the relative images and relative experiences of self. Consequently we are in a limbo. Something within mistrusts them as well—knowing that, at some level, we are conning and being conned. To truly embrace them would be to allow them their emptiness, to relieve these images of the necessity of an independent existence on the plane of identification and projection—that plane on which we solidify and project our ideas of self into the world, and on which the world feeds us back our own projections, so that our understanding now relies on that mirror world.

"Self-reliance" here means that we have our own gyroscope of truth that is neither egoic nor cultural; and that we are willing to sacrifice our favorite self-ideations on its behalf. As we return or release to empty ground, to essential or empty self, there is a gradual release of reliance on the separative or projected self. This process is kindly supported by the abundant opportunities life offers for the humiliation of the projected self. Humiliation is the process by which the self is again reduced to its ground, to its _humus_ —the rich source of nourishment of what is truly human. This sacred, or life-giving humiliation, though its ministrations may be extremely uncomfortable, is, in fact, none other than love itself; an opportunity to re-embrace. If we trust in this continual exposure to the complete insubstantiality of our own being; if we can allow ourselves to rely on that already empty self, already without strategy and without pretense, then all other images of self are forgotten. There is already accord with the way things are.

There is also, of course, _abusive_ humiliation, when another sets out to deliberately crush our spirit and our ego for abusive ends. I am not talking about abusive humiliation here. That is violence against the human spirit, creating a toxic shame that is a disservice to our growth. I am talking about the humiliation brought about by our own foolishness coming up against the nature of life, which allows for a nontoxic and natural sense of shame, the organic process that causes us to pause long enough to let in and digest uncomfortable truths about ourselves.

Sometimes it is a gross humiliation, as when our foolish or shameful behavior brings about a loss of respect or reputation in the eyes of others or of ourselves. But there is also a subtle, or essential, humiliation, which comes about each time we realize the foolishness or the emptiness of our egoic conceits, demands, and expectations; or when we realize, with growing self-awareness, how incessantly we separate ourselves from the truth or we betray or distort the natural gracefulness of our being. This subtler humiliation, this awareness of missing the mark, is indicative of a growing spiritual understanding; and, above all, of a willingness to stand in the humiliation of our falsehoods, little and great, and to be scoured by grace—in which even self-judgment returns to tenderness.

There is still a third humiliation. It is not the humiliation of the foolish ego. It is simply the scouring and dissolving, and the returning to the roots of our emptiness, when we undergo great suffering—not neurotic or egotistical suffering, but the simple, genuine suffering of the heart as it enters into the inevitable love-dance with death at the heart of life; the simple, legitimate effacement that all impermanence, duality, and suffering bring to the ego; the constant ruination of dreams that we, our loved ones—that anything we love—will remain the way we wish.

Once we have learned to embrace all of these humiliations, rather than to resist them, we find that all things conspire to the growth and the nurturance of our souls, and to the largeness of our hearts. As our dreams are humiliated and released into a prior emptiness and completeness, we find ourselves standing on the only reliable foundation for our true and natural ease.

# Just as I lift

Just as I lift

the cup to my lips,

a petal falls.

# Commentary: "Just as I lift"

Ah, to have a cup of tea

in the passing world!

# the nothing at the heart of the world

take the whole

agenda

of your life and

place it

on the shelf

marked: optional

take the demand

of all your

relationships

and place it

on the shelf marked:

practice

take the sum

total of

your indebtedness,

work, bills, taxes,

property and

survival,

and place it

on the shelf

marked: enchantment

take freedom,

service,

God,

enlightenment,

and the salvation

of all

sentient

beings, and

place them on

the shelf

marked: good ideas

take off your shoes

you are now

ready

to be here

# Commentary: "the nothing at the heart of the world"

I can still see myself writing this poem, sitting on a rock in the sun in Acadia Park. It was just a prescriptive checklist of all the mental constructs that we create around our karmic circumstances and that we use to keep us from ourselves.

We can fixate on the structure or story of our lives as if it really carried the ultimate weight of necessity, meaning, and obligation that defines our souls; or we can allow ourselves to see it as an optional set of decisions, among many, that have led to the continually creative context of our being here.

We can fixate upon the demands of our relationships as if all ultimate meaning, support, discouragement, or affirmation comes from them; or we can remember that they are only the supreme opportunities to _practice_ being present, to practice loving, to practice listening, to practice learning, and to practice picking ourselves up and growing out of our fixations and blind spots.

We can sink ourselves under the weight of life's business, giving ultimate substantiality to the drama and to our particular cultural dance of survival; or we can remember that the dance is only a collection of occasions and circumstances—which, when it enchants and overwhelms us with a collective sense of burden, diverts our attention away from the simple, continuing, unburdened fact of our own being.

We can fixate upon the great projections of spiritual meaning, or we can remember that even the loftiest callings, philosophies, and benign intentions are, apart from our _being,_ just good ideas.

At this point we are quite ready to be here, whether we take off our shoes or not. But I did find the sunlit granite boulder to be deliciously warm on my feet.

# Ho!

All of Life is false.

All of Death is false.

Love is true.

Love beautifies life and death.

Our attachment to life is only our resistance

to an imaginary death.

Our attachment to death is only our resistance

to an imaginary life.

Beyond life and death, love is

the lion's roar

and the silent bud.

There is neither everything nor nothing.

WE are the big bang.

# Commentary: "Ho!"

When we are simply awake in the moment, when we allow all things to proclaim themselves as the wondrous expression of their self-nature, beyond the mental categories of being or not-being, then what is life and what is death? Life and death are the marvelous empty dance of vibrant capacity and essential stillness. Life and death play easily and timelessly, like river otters in their spiral embrace. The immediacy of being _is_ life and death together, vibrant and empty of self. How do we embrace and celebrate this spiral dance as one?

Thai Buddhist master Ajahn Chah says, "When I lift this cup I see it as already broken." He means he sees its impermanence, its life and its death, its form and its emptiness, as already one with what it is, so what is there to be attached to? Shunryu Suzuki Roshi says, "Life is like getting onto a small boat that is about to sail out to sea and sink." Not only about to. Already always is. Every moment we are sailing. Every moment we are sunk. Isn't this the very essence of laughter? We might say all laughter, or humor, echoes our innate knowledge of this paradox, whether we are fundamentally comfortable or uncomfortable with it.

But to our egoic minds—that is to say, that awareness that is identified with the paradigm and project of a surviving self—life and death are two shadows projected across our awareness, as the light of their inherent unified nature filters through our mental constructs. Then what I call life is not a direct experience, but a shadow; a presumption followed by a projection of the idea of my identity, life history, expectations, judgments, interpretation of my environment, of others, of materiality, of birth and death. They are complete and compelling reifications. They are assumptions without real reference apart from the mind.

If we consider the proportion of time that we spend actually experiencing life (whatever it is) in this moment as compared to our time spent living within our mental representations of "life," we will see that these moments are precious few. Radical exceptions. "What this is" is an intimacy and a mystery beyond the reach of conceivability. We are in direct, unconditioned awareness of it all the time, but our experience is instantly "dehydrated" and co-opted by our mental representations and constructs. One zen master says, "People of the world look at these flowers as if they were in a dream."

If "life" is an idea, a reification, rather than the simple and immediate truth of my experience, then what can we say of death? Is there such a thing? How do I know? Is it some "thing" to be known or experienced or feared? We know death also in our representations and projections. We assume death from the outside. We see change. We see pain. We see physical bodies cease and decay. We feel the loss of something or someone who was here and is now gone. We have a perfectly reasonable case for a mental category called death; but is it an actual experience? Or is it an idea that keeps me from my actual experience? Life and death, as opposing possibilities, are of course the most important constructs for "a surviving self." However, "surviving self" is already the fundamental distortion in our perception that distorts all other perceptions.

This poem flooded over me as a direct experience some years ago. When the pillars of the constructs of life and death are kicked away, what is there? Well, yes, there may well be laughter. There is also the simple realization of that which is empty but which upholds everything. It is affirmation of being. Its inherent affirmation is the fundamental quality that illumines or informs all that we call life. Its emptiness of being is the fundamental quality that illumines or informs all that we call death. At its root is the joyful union of both, with no separate or separating agenda. It is love. Love is the actual manifestation of presence, empty of everything but its own nature as love. Love is the capacity to be present as love. That's it. But our capacity to love is what beautifies our actual experience.

From the egoic standpoint, as discussed in the poem, our attachments to the constructs of our life—as opposed to simple joyous affirmation—are our bulwark against our fear of negation, a "death" that can only exist entirely in our imagination. But life lived not in immediacy, but in our imagination and projections, loses its spontaneous affirmation and can itself be experienced as conflicting, negating, and overwhelming. Then "life" becomes a "death," and death seems like life, and we can easily escape into what I would call "strategies of death" as a way of escaping the suffering of life. These include strategies of avoidance, withdrawal, or self-repression; fantasies of stillness, peace, transcendence, and enlightenment; or violent or destructive behavior, directed inwardly or outwardly, that seeks to reduce the pain of our life back to the ashes of non-being again. These are the forms our attachment to death may take in the face of feelings we are not prepared to feel, and in resistance to a life that is also constructed in our imagination.

From the reality of love, which is our genuine capacity to engage from a place of presence, "life and death" is never a problem, but an opportunity. Pleasure and pain are moments of experience. We may engage action or we may engage stillness; we may even be drawn into progressive realms of experience that are beyond the so-called material realm. But now this is a spontaneous encounter of love and intimacy; not a resistance or a denial.

An enigmatic story is told of a zen master and three disciples walking along a lonely road. As dark falls they come upon an abandoned hut and decide to take shelter there for the night. As they settle themselves inside the hut, the master strikes a light and then almost immediately blows it out. "Speak!" he demands of his disciples. The first one says, "The jewel-ornamented phoenix floats in the red glow of the evening sky." The second says, "The rust-colored snake slips across the dusty road." The third one says, "Watch your step." The zen master turns to his third disciple and says, "You have destroyed our sect."

Clear as mud, n'est-ce pas? I don't know what it means either, but here's my take. You know, when you blow out a light in a dark space, you see an after-image, sometimes a bright play of color, green or blue or yellow, backlit with red. It is like the jewel-ornamented phoenix floating in the red glow of the sky. It is the play of phenomena—the contrast of bright imagery against the seeming darkness of non-being. The image is insubstantial, yet it has relative existence, like the dream world in which we live our life. Eventually that after-image begins to fade, and the darkness and the stillness begin to dominate our experience. Now there is no contrast. It is absence of phenomena. It is black on black or brown on brown, like the rust-colored snake sidling along the dirt road.

The master and his disciples, alone in that empty house, have just gone through the drama of light and dark, of being and nothingness, of life and death. And that is where we seem to find ourselves. Are we to sit here then, creating images of light and dark, debating endless philosophies and strategies of life and death? "Watch your step," says the third. Simple and practical advice for one alone in a dark house. Be present, pay attention, act caringly; put one foot in front of the other. Embody what it is you are, without attending to ideas and images of life and death; without attaching to images of self and other. Be that manifestation of empty cognizance that penetrates everywhere, but is no one, and has nowhere to penetrate; that extends compassion as a function of its nature. That is not life or death; that is love. "Well," says the master. "If we just do as you say it puts our whole zen enterprise—and the whole cult of this world—out of business!" There is simply awareness and love.

The story-making activities of the human mind have endlessly created images and mythologies of life and death. Our projections have painted us into a corner where we play out our strategies of survival or avoidance. One moment we are clinging to the projected image of survival in order to avoid annihilation and the fear of losing what we want. The next moment we are clinging to some strategy of annihilation or disappearance in order to avoid having more of what we don't want or think we can't handle. This whole situation of life and death—and all of the imagery associated with it—is false. It has no fundamental truth. It is actually this projection that takes our awareness out of the fundamental truth of who and what we already are.

There is not a who and not a what (or only a vibrancy of "who" and "what"), other than that love which, being nothing, is able to embrace it all. It is this love that is the underlying truth of the seeming worlds of life and death, and whose beauty or substance they reveal. Turned from love, the projections of life and death are an empty shell of suffering and contradiction. Suffused with love, they are its beautiful expression.

Locked into the realm of the mind, and the way it organizes perceptions, this may seem like abstract spiritual philosophy. The mind can only see it that way. But the conscious being we are has the capacity to release its identity with the structures of mind, by which the whole material universe is constructed, and allow the universe to blossom anew in each moment as the expression of our love. This is the secret of our actual existence and our actual power. Love sounds its barbaric yawp over the rooftops of our conditioning. It also folds itself along the fiber of the world, silently entering into every xylem and phloem, to blossom as the present moment. When we drop our fascination with the mental structures of life and death, of past and future, then we are simply awakening the present moment with our tender gaze. We are bringing it to life. We are the creator God, discovering herself, in love, by giving life to all things. _This_ is the moment of creation. We are the Big Bang.

# the old tree

the old tree has been

standing a million years,

so covered with moss,

its memory is lost, its tongue

is dumb. don't you see,

I am also an old tree,

and also overgrown with love.

# Commentary: "the old tree"

This old tree's been standing a million years. That's an expression: when we say "a million," when we say "ancient," we mean prior to mind, beyond our relative figuring—what's always so. Why did Bodhidharma come from the West, a monk asks zen master Joshu. Joshu replies: "The cypress tree in the garden."

"So covered with moss," the poem says. This moss is stillness; it is luminous heart; it is no-reckoning; it is nonduality; it is silence. Endless varieties of life find nourishment, rest, and shelter in its being.

Don't you see, I am also that ancient tree. Both you and I cannot be other than that. We are both the tree and the moss that grows on it. Please. Pause. Take a breath and drop all other pretension. Confess with me now: we are also overgrown with love.

# we are here to transmit virtue

just sitting

a flicker

of prayer flags

at the edge

of my eye

a flicker

of the sacrifice

and simple gift

that even

now

sustains

the dharma

over centuries

the meeting

of foreheads in blessing

the lighting

of butter lamps

the litany

of monks and nuns

offering

their final blessing

into the teeth

of the great Rampage

that would

destroy them:

may all beings be released

from suffering

the whipping

of prayer flags

in the mountain wind

why are we here

in this world?

we are here

for the dharma

the old lama said

we are here

to transmit virtue

# Commentary: "we are here to transmit virtue"

Just sitting, the gaze falls to the floorboards across the room, but is not focused there. The visual field is relaxed and open to its edges, dust in the sunlight, the nodding of maple leaves in the wind, and out the south window to my left, the flicker of prayer flags that trail from my roof and across the edge of view.

The world and all things sustain themselves by their inherent virtue far beyond the scope of my egotistical point of view. The immensity of the tree and its dance in the wind is vastly greater than any meaning or notice I may give to it in my preoccupied life. So too the flicker of prayer flags, that they exist at all, that they reflect a sacrifice and simple gift beyond my knowing, the virtue of so many beings transmitting this dharma over human time, as all things gift all things with their virtue beyond our knowing. May we not forget it.

What is virtue? It is the Tao. It is the self-nature of all things manifesting for the sake of all things. It is the water gathering in the air, the great rain clouds saluting and pelting the earth, the water that penetrates the ground and bathes the roots of all things, sustaining and nourishing all life. It is the great sunrise sky as the virtue of light meets the virtue of our atmosphere.

Everything is transmitting this virtue to everything. The great exploding supernovas are transmitting it throughout space, their elements arising again as the virtue of our own bodies; and _we_ transmit it as we cast our loving gaze anywhere; or as Confucius says, we "watch with affection the way things grow." Or as Emerson says, in one of his Taoist moments: "Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature of things."

This has sustained the dharma over the centuries. Not Buddhism as such, but this "adherence in action" on the part of countless beings, not only through heroic acts of virtue and realization beyond my comprehension, but in the meeting of foreheads in blessing, the simple acts of praise or remembrance, the willingness of awakened life to offer a blessing even into the teeth of that great rampaging unknowingness that is not awake to its own life and would destroy it.

The prayer flags whipping in the mountain wind are the same prayer flags whipping outside my window.

Why are we here in this world? We are already here as the rich and complete expression of that which our minds are drawn to seek—or drawn to deny. This is nothing other than the dharma sustaining itself over centuries, this bird call no less than the dedication of all those monks and nuns.

If we took a survey of this year's graduating class of college students and asked, Why are we here in this world?—I am sure we would get a very different answer than the old lama has given us. That is inevitable and perhaps as it should be. But this old lama has had the blessing of time to sift through it all and he sees nothing extraneous. We are here to transmit virtue.

# The Congo Women

The Congo women grab their skirts;

they run and hide. They are found out.

Their bodies reel within the tide of vicious

armies, lout-faced boys who never had

a chance to sprout as honored men;

who do not know what they're about.

They rape and rape and rape again.

The Congo women sway with pride.

Their precious bodies and their lives now

share a sisterhood of shame that is

not theirs. Hundreds of thousands,

none is spared this dark undoing,

cast aside like tattered garments

on a tattered countryside.

The Congo women are our pride.

We own a portion of the shame. Mother,

daughter, sister, bride, how I wish

to know your name, receive the blessing

of your eyes. And to your staggered heart,

my wooing: "Don't drop out. Your soul

pursue you through your darkest time.

There is a way all hearts that

wake within the world are going."

Though I am blind and dumb

like all the rest, who are complicit in

this game beyond our knowing.

# Commentary: "The Congo Women"

This poem needed to be included because as human beings we cannot escape facing into the pain of the enormous atrocities and profound violence to the human body and spirit that are woven into our human experience. After all, what kind of transparent world are we talking about, anyway? Some paradisiacal Buddha-field in which Congolese women, Bosnian women, Sudanese women, you-name-it women (and men) aren't being raped and tortured en masse by armies of insanity and terror? Where some human beings haven't incited one another to butcher their countrymen wantonly on the streets and in their churches and homes? Where people don't blow themselves up in crowds at mosques and wedding parties, in acts of great anger and great delusion? In this instance (as on many occasions), it was the inconceivable enormity of the continuing tragedy in the Congo that spoke to me so deeply.

How do we fathom and how do we hold such a world? What does it ask of us? How do we understand it in the light of Buddhadharma? We are not even speaking here of the institutionalized violence employed on behalf of our statecraft, our business-craft, or our "defense-"craft, though it has its hand in places we wouldn't imagine. Aside from all policy justification or political, economic, or historical analysis, Buddhism manages to deconstruct it all very simply and exactly as greed, anger, and ignorance.

But we also hear stories of specific acts of devastating violence in all parts of the world. And though most of us are fortunate not to be living in the middle of such extreme and overt violence and suffering, we have created an extended nervous system on this planet—the electronic news media—that enables it to live in us. The media stimulates and exploits us daily with stories of outrage and violence with which we have no personal or bodily experience, and to which we often can bring no presence of mind nor clear moral response; it only keeps us more agitated and locked into a virtual world of negative imagery and drama. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, we may find ourselves to be present of heart, and broken of heart, for all the suffering that occurs within the immediate sphere of our own lives, as well as for the extreme violence and suffering that is part of our human history, or of which we are informed by the daily news.

No doubt we have deep receptors within our own karmic memory, having experienced it all. Just as Tibetan teachers like to point out that in the infinite karmic history of souls everyone we meet has been our mother at some point, so have we experienced every atrocity and, at some point or other, perpetrated it. I know I have been both the inmate at Auschwitz and the abusive prison guard. I know I have been both the hero and the collaborator.

But wait a minute. What does any of this have to do with our river of light; with absolute reality; with nonduality; with awakened transparency of being; with enlightenment? Aren't I only speaking here of the world of dream and illusion? Am I sending negative energy into the world by focusing on stories of suffering? How do I have compassion for suffering without perpetuating illusion and negativity? This seems to be a confusing issue for some who contemplate spiritual reality, so let's try to look at it clearly.

The first hallmark of spiritual health is our capacity to respond to things as they are from a place of conscious and loving presence. This is clearly not negativity. Our "negativity," on the other hand, is defined by the extent to which we are unable to embrace reality with an open heart, by which we regularly dramatize our reactive judgments through reactive imagery, speech, and behavior, and the constriction of our life energy. It is quite easy to become habituated—even addicted—to this kind of negativity in our life, and to allow the "daily news" to exploit it. Then, in a sense, we _are_ giving energy to the same underlying suffering and illusion. However, the recognition of suffering, and the process by which suffering is perpetuated, is not in itself negativity. It is, after all, the first of Buddha's "noble truths." The problem is that we routinely get caught in manufacturing a reactive drama that keeps us lost in negative imagery and negative emotional patterns. It is when we recognize and forsake the drama that we are truly able to empathize and hold the pain of another without shutting down our awareness or our hearts, and we can respond appropriately from what is most alive and awake in us. This is an essential strength of our humanity.

Mahayana Buddhism has looked deeply into this question and given it a lot of attention. From the most fully developed Mahayana Buddhist point of view, the mental content and delusions we project onto the world—which are the basis for all violent actions—are totally false, and their imputed reality is nonexistent. But the resultant fact of suffering is real, if relative, and not to be denied or dramatized, but responded to with all the compassion of our being. Our lives will make clear to each of us individually the appropriate or actual theater of our availability, the differing contexts in which we are each able to offer genuine presence and service to one another and to the greater community.

This compassion of being is integral to what Buddhists call bodhicitta, or enlightened heart. Bodhicitta is the underlying nature of reality to serve the efflorescence and fulfillment of being in all its manifestation. It is otherwise said to seek the "salvation," enlightenment, and happiness of all sentient beings. It is neither grandiose nor dismissive. It does not deny, neither is it negated by, our human capacity to generate destruction and suffering out of our greed, anger, ignorance, and indifference. In the relative sense, it is a quality of selfless dedication of heart and mind to the welfare of all beings that we deliberately cultivate as part of our spiritual development. It is the activity of a self learning to care for other selves, to extend compassion in all circumstances of suffering, and to seek enlightenment only for the sake of enlightenment for all. This is _relative bodhicitta._

Should our realization allow us to apprehend the underlying, nondual ground of being, to see beyond the relative illusion of "separate selves"—to see, as Buddha expressed, that all things are already empty of self, perfect and enlightened by their very nature—this realization does not separate us from the world of suffering, but only deepens the foundation of our compassion. This is _absolute bodhicitta._ Bodhicitta, then, is not only a human aspiration or a relative compassionate response, it is the very ground of being itself, whose inherent nature extends or flows indiscriminately like water through all planes of illusion or relativity. It doesn't say, "Sorry, Mac, I've read all about you. I know there's no self. Get over it." That _would_ be relativeness; that would be duality. Bodhicitta is absolute. There is awakened presence. There is emptiness dancing. There is absolute love. But there is no ivory tower of enlightenment. No gated community of the heart. So we needn't be shy to face into the world of human experience; to embrace human suffering, and to allow our natural compassion and emotional response to become an expression of absolute compassion.

The great truth is not in retreat from the nightmare worlds of human experience. To say that heaven and hell are a creation of the mind is not to say that heaven and hell don't exist. They are manifested psychically and physically moment by moment by the capacities of the mind. There appear to be infinite worlds, infinite sub-bardos of experience and of human functioning, in which the human being is capable of functioning in coherence with his divine nature or in total incoherence with that nature. It is that nature that doesn't vary, not the manifest acts of the world. And that nature—bodhicitta—stands present before both heaven and hell.

Thus, later Mahayana thought distinguishes three relative levels—or aspects, we might say—of reality. The first level is the totally false conceptual or imaginary world that we project upon reality. It has no real or objective referent. This is the deluded mind of ego, separation, greed, anger, and ignorance fueling the self-centered behavior out of which we create our karma, generating suffering for ourselves and others. The second level is the simple reality of the suffering world created by this karma. It is relatively true, having been generated by our own karmic delusions. That is, it has been created out of a web of delusion, and is thus not fundamentally true; but whereas delusions are to be seen through, suffering itself is to be attended to. Our response to this world of suffering comes spontaneously from the compassionate expression of our own Buddha-nature, the place of no delusion and no projection. This is regarded as the third level, or absolute reality. In sum, the Mahayana path is, ultimately, to see through delusion (1), and respond compassionately to suffering (2), from a place of enlightenment (3), that realization that recognizes all as its own radiant face. You might ask: Isn't there a level two-and-a-half, for those of us who aren't enlightened? The moment of selfless compassion without projection is already an expression of enlightenment.

In this way we are inspired to realize that absolute simple transparency or love out of which all reality arises, while in no way making secondary, or distancing ourselves from, this world of relativity and suffering. Rather, we are continually rekindled to engage compassionately the manifest world of suffering human beings. For after all, this suffering is the counterpoint and the very invitation to the manifestation of our divine nature, or Buddha nature. The world of human suffering, karmic consequence, and moral choice is itself the nondual reality, the intimate face of God, or original mind.

The scale of the warfare that has been going on in parts of Africa is, in the number of countries that have been involved, the millions being killed, and the massive devastation, the equivalent of our past world wars. Its atrocities mirror so many other atrocities that have been part of the common fare of our daily news. We may focus on the violence, but it is fundamentally news of social disruption, ethnic and tribal passions and delusions, and, not least, current political and economic manipulation.

In parts of Africa, as elsewhere, climatological changes, population and territorial pressures, and social or economic iniquities that are in part legacies of conquest or of colonial manipulation set the stage for conflict. Our instinctive and hormonal endowment has geared us to be aggressive, tribal, and protective in the face of perceived threats to security. And we have no doubt inherited many cultural patterns of warfare, raiding, and ritualized aggression. Yet human beings are not inevitably inclined to hate or make war on one another; nor are we _by nature_ intolerant of other races or other religions. It is the fundamental perception of security that supports the blossoming of our more inclusive and more integrative brain functions, including our innate capacity for creativity, problem-solving, partnership, tolerance, attunement, empathy, and altruism.

Thus our evolutionary history wires us in part for protectiveness and aggression; and yet we are also already wired to develop beyond them. But when a climate of insecurity and fear pervades it can affect the very neurological development and function of the organism, such that these creative, altruistic, and integrative capacities are overridden or left undeveloped—"never have a chance to sprout"—by instinctive black-and-white fight-or-flight responses that are _designed_ to be black and white. The neurological infrastructure that allows deeper attunement to self and others is literally unavailable; nor is there sufficient cultural modeling available to encourage its activation. Then it is easy to exploit the hormones of aggression.

When there is a fundamental wound in the psyche or in the social body—present and past stress of uprootedness, disconnection, scarcity, or fear (all of which are often systematized in the society and in the state)—then that wound can be inflamed and manipulated along racial, religious, or ethnic lines by fundamentalist religious and tribal narratives exploited by the self-centered economic and political interests of the few. This has been true in Bosnia, Rwanda, Congo, Sudan, Nigeria, and elsewhere. Although here in the U.S. the level of political and social development is vastly different, we can see the ways in which the dynamics of woundedness and fear also largely govern our own history and politics. The drama of woundedness, separation, manipulation, and further wounding is central to the dream (and central to our human history); and to the endless karmic cycles of cause and effect, of greed, anger, and ignorance. What is called "the dharma" is the teaching that shows us the way out—in whatever form and in whatever way that teaching comes to us.

Clearly the perpetrators of violence are always victims too: of their own ignorance, of manipulation by greater forces, and of the whole host of concurrent causes and conditions. Thich Nhat Hanh, in his poem about the rape of a refugee girl—a "boat person"—by a Vietnamese pirate, writes that if the girl and the pirate had been subject to different causes and conditions, he would have been the refugee girl, and she would have been the pirate. And further, he says, "I myself would be the pirate or the girl if subject to the same causes." _Until there is liberating awareness in the midst of causes and conditions,_ "we do not know what we're about." Jesus, looking down from his agonized perch, sees this clearly and compassionately, and says, essentially, "They do not know what they're about. They do not know who they are."

The Congo women sway with pride; or, as we have used the word earlier, with virtue. This virtue is the natural and expressive pride of life to be itself; the virtue of the self-nature of all beings. It is music and song and the capacity to nurture. It is the swaying of the hips. This pride is shamed as the earth itself is shamed by the shameful acts of others.

But they are also _our_ pride, these beautiful women. All life is our pride, our beloved Shakya; and we sway too with that sisterhood of being. How I wish my sisters to be free to declare themselves; to whisper their eyes' secrets, and to stand and to heal in the fullness of their humanity. As I call to them and woo the goddess within them, I say, "Just to know you by your name, to fully embrace the reality of your individual humanity, would make me a richer man." Yes, they have wounded you deeply, but they cannot take God from your eyes, even if she is in exile there.

This is not an "African" problem. We are all intricately entwined, at both individual and group levels, in the karmic and moral knot of this human catastrophe. First, we are entwined through a collective colonial history that continues to provide the essential model of how we create wealth in the developed world: the exploitation of resources and markets, and the manipulation of land and peoples, that erodes the intactness of cultures and the primary and reciprocal relationship to the earth on which our humanity largely depends, and whose loss makes atrocity possible. Second, through our continued collaboration in demanding those specific goods—as part of a way of life we take for granted—whose production seems to depend on this manipulation and exploitation. Third, through an elaborate cosmic web of cause and effect beyond our knowing, but to which we must bring moral and spiritual responsibility as the other face of transparency. For in relation to our Congolese sisters, and in relation to all living beings who share this web, there runs across the karmic warp of our complicity the essential woof of our intimacy. This is the heartbreaking poignancy, the vulnerability and tenderness wanting to be spoken, the grief of our deepest memory arising out of our amnesia and disconnect, to shake our hypnotic trance of separation, and to be cried out across time and space.

If we start from the ground of conscious, loving presence—which is not only our "moral" ground but our actual ground—and the equality of worth of all human beings, then any action that disregards the absolute integrity and wholeness of another, or of his or her equal relationship to the fruits of the earth, is an immoral act. And the exploitation or denial of another's wholeness through the exercise of physical, political, or financial power or manipulation, even unwittingly and at a distance, is oppression or enslavement of one form or another. If we look at the world with these eyes, lifted from our systemic sleep, we see here, in the midst of all the wealth, comfort, and liberal lifestyle that we take for granted, that it depends on the enslavement of people—and materials. That is, it depends on a conventional flattening of consciousness that reduces all reality and all beings, including the earth, into exploitable objects in the satisfaction of our arrogance or narcissistically conceived needs. Such consciousness would also find it absurd to ask the earth if she wishes to be mined, making neither material nor ritual attempts to repay or to restore, let alone to restrain; or to honor the earth for her bounty—an awareness and a moral sensibility long ago abandoned.

These moral considerations are inherent in the precepts and in the Noble Eight-Fold Path of liberation, which are central to the Buddha's earliest teaching. "Right livelihood" is that livelihood that is not based on the immoral exploitation of others or of the earth—neither of the labor or the resources of others at the one end, nor of the needs, desires, or consumption patterns of others at the other end. Conversely, right livelihood is also that work that has its own integrity, that is not subject to exploitation or enslavement by others or by immoral systems. Similarly, the injunction in the precepts to refrain from intoxicants is aptly expanded in the interpretation of Thich Nhat Hanh to mean the abstaining from addictive patterns of consumption—which calls us to our moral responsibility as consumers not to be intimidated and exploited either by our own desires or by the manipulations of the marketplace, but to understand what systems we support by our behavior, and to take moral responsibility for that. All of which is very inconvenient.

This is not to suggest some new popular crusade that all must adopt to be morally or politically correct. It is one thing to engage in political or ecological critique. It is another thing to engage in a conscious and principled activism, which is a whole other book. It is still another to see truly into the complex karmic and moral fabric of the world, without denial and with humility and compassion. To do so, not from a place of reactive drama, but with awakeness and presence of heart, is intrinsic to enlightenment.

The great Indian saint Sant Ajaib Singh Ji once summed up the path by saying, "Do not intimidate anyone, and do not be intimidated by anyone." This is a formula for both morality and freedom. And this moment is the very world—the world of dreams, the world of causes and conditions, the world of moral responsibility—in which transparency is working as the pervasive truth. The absolute and the relative have no two sides. They are both at once the vast expanse and the intimate expression of prajnaparamita. And they are simply you.

# I Want This Delight for You

There is a delight intrinsic but hard wrought,

pressed from the berries of the briar—

prolific at these heights but frequently ignored,

gathered at no cost save all that the world

has taught us to desire.

There is a delight that will never turn

away from the blood in the streets,

the endless day of our racial night,

dark with the degradation of the daily

news and the violent squandering

of the human heart.

There is a delight dumbfounded

at the vista of its own ascent

and the seeming impossibility

that another can find his way here;

the awe that our footsteps

turned this way at all, and the dismay

that for those who come after

the trailheads could not possibly

stay clear. Still there are new

hikers coming every year.

There is a delight that grows in its insistency

amid the falling towers of hope and fear,

the culling of the dragon's knife,

released into the hands of timelessness

within the sweat and rubble of an

imperfect life. There is a delight

that is your lungs' true air, distilled

from your last sigh, sweetened on your

own lips, lit on the wick of your profoundest

care; the delight that has secretly

carried us here.

I am wanting this delight for you.

I want you to find the string unrolled

on this journey by those who have

come before. I want you to find my

hand extending in the labyrinth;

the opening and the hedge door. I

want you to walk on me as on the ground

of your own confidence, to find

that vast and intimate terrain that opens

in the headlights of your own

compassion—

to know beyond doubt that what

you are is the way you have longed to find,

the way you have always walked,

the love you have wished to be. To hear

me whistling far down this highway

of transparency, where my delight

is just to serve as road crew

on the freeway of your ecstasy,

shoveling crushed stone and

smoothing out all distance and all

time; that right here where all life begins

and ends we may yet watch the same

setting sun, the same rising moon.

# Commentary: "I Want This Delight for You"

After many years of practice, something begins to emerge within the sweat and rubble of an imperfect life. That delight that is distilled from our own living, sweetened on our own lips, burning the oil of our own passionate commitment to being, and that has always been the essential oxygen of our life.

This delight is the energy of our own essential nature—the essential nature of all being—yet its sweet fruit is consciously available only to those willing to face into the briar of their experience. Its fruit is in immediate supply, yet bypassed by those captivated by the easier array of passing distractions and compensations offered by the world.

This intrinsic or essential delight is not a one-sided, self-involved, or Pollyanna experience. It does not depend on the mind's frail attempts to maximize comfort or avoid pain. It does not turn away from the profound truth of suffering or violence within the hearts of human beings, which is enacted across the theater of history and the daily news. It is aware of the preciousness of this moment of human birth. It trembles with humility and awe.

Sitting there on the hillside of our mature reflection, on that occasion of delight and gratitude, we may look back at our own past journey and on our own choices; on the grace that drew us forth from the labyrinth of the mind into the light of our own being; and at the long years of our own apparent effort, intention, and diligence—in the face of all our stumbling and imperfection—which inexorably carried our feet forward while the winds of distraction, inertia, and delusion seemed to carry the day all around us. We are dumbfounded that the camel of our ignorance and our self-centeredness ever managed to get even its nose through the eye of the needle. And in our concern for others, and in the seeming impossibility of this journey of spiritual awakening amidst all the distracting messages of life, we just want to run down the mountainside and make sure the trailheads aren't overgrown, and wave our hands, and post signs that say, "Please eat the berries" and "Pay attention" and "This way please," and offer our bodies as stepping stones.

But the same grace that is operating beyond the illusion of self and other continues to manifest as an endless file of hikers up the mountainside who are welcomed by new trailheads and whose pathways will not duplicate our own. And to codify the trail or to post too many signposts is to turn the living impulse into personal formula, which the ego thinks it needs to do. So while we may be lovingly anxious to unroll a string, sometimes the best we can do is to be heard whistling. To hold space. To shovel stone. And to answer when called.

This poem is basically about bodhicitta: the intrinsic energy and impulse to awaken; the dawning mind of awakeness itself; and above all the awakened heart energy that knows nothing but the commitment to the awakening and happiness of all beings. It is about that great conspiracy of help in our world. It is about the state of mind of the helper. When we are graced with the intrinsic delight of being, at these times we would easily lie down as a bridge to be walked on, disappear into the apparatus of liberation, enter with all intimacy and availability into the journey of all beings, praying for their own delight, celebrating their awakenings. This is the delight of the note to be the music, the delight of the drop to be the fountain. The disappearance into the service of What-We-Are, all as an expression of the great companionship of being that is true at the beginning and true at the end. So that you and I may simply sit together and enjoy the same setting sun, the same rising moon.

# When I first saw my face

When I first saw my face

reflected in that river,

I saw all things looking out

from that one face,

and I saw that the river

had never left its source.

We were all comrades then

on a hillside in spring,

dancing at a festival from which

no one has ever been excluded,

and no one has ever left.

# Commentary: "When I first saw my face"

Here again is that companionship that none of us has ever left, in truth. When I look at my own face in the mirror, I see a separate being. But when I saw my face in that great river of being, all time, space, and separation collapsed into that emptiness that includes everything. Then I saw not the outlines of a separate face, but a countenance out of which all things were looking back; all things residing within and as that original face—before the birth of the appearance of separation—in which all apparently separated things remained at home in their own source. And yet—as a river that never leaves its source but is still a river—it is not static but flows into all manifestation.

We are all drops of that fountain, notes of that music, dancers at a festival from which no one has ever been excluded, and no one has ever left.

# Simple Prayer

Day by day,

May I carry water.

May this house be in order,

May the fire spark.

Better to recite

A simple prayer than master

All the dark.

# Commentary: "Simple Prayer"

Day by day we find ourselves in the dance of relationship, even if we live in solitude. Relationship to the broom handle as my hands curl along its length, not mechanically, but as living invitation to work together a while; even dance together. Relationship to the dust that is the occasion for our dance. I am in relationship to the known as it rises before me. I am also in relationship to the "dark"—and to the unknown parts of my own self—in ways that I cannot know. This dance—when I am awake to it—is just the conscious level of the dance of "interbeing," as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. The relationship we acknowledge outwardly is the reflection of an even more profound relationship; an interpenetrating reality. Nothing and no one even _exists_ by virtue of, or as, its own self, its own separate individuality. Every thing is an individualized expression or appearance of what is in truth not individual at all, but an _interbeing; everything_ participates in what expresses as _anything._ In my unconsciousness of that, everything becomes the hidden side of my own being. Our impulse to prayer is also part of our dance of relationship—an instinctive recognition of our interdependency.

This poem must have been half of a dialogue I was having with myself at the time, living alone after six years of intensive Rinzai zen training. The poem addressed the side of me that may have still fancied "enlightenment" to be a heroic personal achievement, rather than the fruiting of a deepening relationship to existence. But now as I entered more into my own simple rhythms of living—what I described elsewhere at the time as "the miracle of self finding its harmony with the elements"—I could relax into a growing faith in reciprocity, and offer that simple prayer as an affirmation that the natural order of things as they are—not my "ability" to "penetrate" it—was the mysterious dharma and the great support of being.

It is very easy to develop a spiritual materialism of accomplishment or mastery—for the ego, ironically, to expect to take charge of its own dismantling as its final triumph; to master all the dark and emerge as light. Because we have so many practices and teachings we can call on, both to deepen and to expand awareness, and even to loosen and to melt the boundaries of the self, it is easy to attach to the notion that our practice and our enlightenment consist of learning to accomplish something, of mastering some kind of ultimate vision or ultimate skill. But our practice is simply our moment of availability to what is always unconditioned and unknown—our moment of availability to interbeing.

Though there are truly many yogic or psychic skills that one may master, and an infinite fund of gnostic information, neither skills nor information are the essential practice. And any realization or mastery that "I" accomplish must necessarily stay on the outside. A microscope can heighten our capacity to see into a cell, but we will still only know the cell from the outside. My mastery will always remain a mastery of outsides, of separateness, until the self is completely surrendered, along with the need to know or not know. Because that which knows is not "me." The ego's old paradigm of knowing is forever surrendered. Realization is not crime scene investigation, nor forensics; the need to shine a light in every last corner. It is a coming home. The eyes are now content with their own light. If we are at home, then our hidden wealth is just as much ours as the wealth that is revealed. It is all the real body of our being. And it may be expressed as simple prayer.

There is a dynamic and paradoxical balance at play between our wholeness and our partiality; between our authority and our dependency; between our capacity and our surrender. We may disastrously distort our true nature if we fixate on one side of that divine balance and exclude the other. The languaging of different spiritual systems may often seem to favor or emphasize one side of that equation. But if we look more carefully—and if it is a true and whole system—we will see the other side being fully acknowledged as well. The saint may swear her complete surrender to and dependence on God, and yet will show herself to be an individual of great personal authority, autonomy, and presence. The sage may recognize a self that is coequal and not less than all of creation, yet demonstrate an absolute humility and surrender in the face of all things.

Perhaps a more humanly functional definition of mastery would be the growing integration and grace with which we're able to dance along that boundary line of our capacity and our surrender; of our understanding and our ignorance; and of the willingness to take responsibility and the understanding that we do nothing. Hence, if I were to see you disowning your own capacity, or somehow disowning or projecting your own divine nature far from yourself, I might lovingly call your attention to that. The same, on the other hand, if I were to see you identifying with a grandiose notion that separated you from the genuine gifts to be found in your own simplicity, interdependence, and emptiness. I would hope that I could do the same for myself; but I would just as likely need _your_ help with that.

Our externalized popular religious tradition in the West, imagining the greatest distance between the self and the divine, has taught us that prayer is essential, even if carried on in the most rote and superficial sense; whereas meditation has become unknown to it, and even suspect. These days, because of the Eastern influence, meditation is better understood and has taken a considerable foothold in our culture among a generation that may understandably feel a bit confused, or even squeamish, about prayer. At the entry level, meditation and prayer may appear to be two different windows onto the unknown. It may appear that the many techniques of meditation speak to the development of our own capacity or wholeness, while prayer may be associated with dependency, or devotion—genuine or superficial—to something outside ourselves. But, at deeper levels of practice and absorption, the distinction is not so clear. True meditation requires true devotion and surrender, and true prayer requires true presence. And both together call on us to resume and embrace our true identity, neither childishly dependent or personal, nor adolescently independent or impersonal, but truly engaged and intimate.

We are spiritually nourished by—and exist by virtue of—the mysterious dialectic of the personal and the impersonal, which together can embrace the richness of reality. To cling only to an image of personal separateness, and of the form, or otherness, of a God, is to withhold our true communion with, or our release into, the effulgent and infinite emptiness of Being, which is of conceptless dimension. Equally, to adhere to a notion of reality as impersonal and empty is to amputate, or to deny ourselves surrender into, the rich dimension of the Personal, of the communion of awake, loving intelligence with awake, loving intelligence, which is also beyond concept or limiting idea. Yes, I am saying that the personal is a dimension of consciousness itself, whose significance deepens as consciousness deepens. Just as consciousness is _not_ an artifact of the brain, personalness is not an artifact of being human. It is, along with the impersonal, part of the unfolding intimacy of Being.

In one of the best known texts of mystical Christianity, _The Cloud of Unknowing,_ the author states that the highest form of prayer is what he calls "naked intent upon God." This means that we come before the unknown naked of all agenda, naked of all projections, and naked of all thought and imagery, and make ourselves—our souls—simply open and available to that which our mind cannot possibly wrap around. At this point all formalistic prayer, and even all formalistic meditation, come together and release in a profound state of surrendered openness, empty of all distinction and separation. All prayerful images or ideas of God are dropped, so it becomes a prayer of emptiness. But in our absolute availability, all presumption of a separate sufficiency, impersonalness, or independence is also dropped. So it becomes a meditation of absolute relationship or reciprocity. The little heart and the big heart, the little mind and the big mind, achieve not "knowing" but congruence. The fragrant plant that arises from the heart is allowed—without being named—to take root in its true soil.

Life is reciprocity by nature. Divinity is reciprocity by nature. God is not an island of absoluteness. When there is one, there is two. When there is lover, there is beloved. Form and emptiness never exist singly. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost co-arise. This is the very model of intimacy and reciprocity. In Tibetan Buddhism it is said that the Mother Light of Original Being awakens within the individual practitioner as the Child Light, which now recognizes its mother and is one with her. True prayer, then, might be said to be a surrender to reciprocity, to the reciprocal aspect of our own divine nature. It is a conscious and heartfelt willingness to open reciprocity between the visible and the invisible world; or, we might even say, between the visible and the invisible sides of the self. Here the self is understood, as in the Taoist understanding, not as a solid separate reality, but as the reified image of the meeting place of the in-breath and the out-breath—the wind of the spirit—formative and ever transforming, the very essence and expression of reciprocity, which is the Tao in manifestation. Because this reciprocity is fundamentally true, there is no mastery, whether intellectual, yogic, or physical, apart from reciprocity. Reciprocity is the context for our own mastery. No matter how much mastery I gain, if I've not learned the principle of reciprocity, I'm out on a limb.

When I wrote this poem many years ago, its images were literal. I was living in my little cabin and I was indeed dependent on the water I carried every day. For my warmth I was dependent daily on the graciousness of fire. Fire sparks. We can say it is the masculine, the yang activity of the universe. Water yields and flows. We can say it is the feminine, or the yin activity. This balance of yin and yang is the natural expression of the Tao, the Way of the house being in order because it is true to its own nature. This dance of reciprocity is engaged throughout the creative play of nature, and from here all the way up to the highest angelic orders. "Who, if I were to cry out, would hear me among the angelic orders?" asks Rilke. For that matter, will fire hear me? Will water hear me? Only if I address them directly and truly from a mind of true reciprocity. Offer jade to She who dwells as water. Offer chocolate to Old Man Fire. The rational mind balks. But why not? Everything is an offering and a blessing. Everything is a request and a prayer. Here the poet surrenders the illusion of mastery, the obligation of mastery, and simply re-engages the natural reciprocity of things; the true prayer. The true home.

The prayer spoken in this poem is not the deep, contemplative prayer of naked intention that we referred to above. It is just an everyday prayer or invocation. But its spirit is one of simplicity and trust. Of relinquishment. It is the nature of the mind to "master all the dark." It is the nature of the heart to trust in the natural reciprocity of being.

# Epitaph

Tips of the maples dance gently

in the empty sky.

Birds, cars, machines—summer sounds.

Within the listening, a listening.

More space, more sound.

Neither wind, nor flag, nor mind.

Tip the basket—fishes, loaves.

See that all are fed.

# Commentary: "Epitaph"

The story is told that Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch of Chinese zen, still unknown to the world, is journeying along a road when he approaches two monks outside a monastery who are engaged in dialectical debate. Observing the monastery pennant flying in the wind, one monk argues that it is the flag that is moving. The other claims it is the wind that is moving. Hui-neng passes them and says flatly: "Mind is moving." Upstream of the debate, upstream of the duality of wind and flag, there is "just this." This "upstream" is not a place. It is the simple, intimate awareness that is the reality and function of mind, as Hui-neng uses the word. This mind is the sound of one hand. It is the one without a second, outrageous and without contradiction. It is the pennant flying in the wind; the tips of the maples dancing in the sky. It is moonlight falling on pines with no one to witness.

Standing here in summer, there is just this world. Just this exquisite moment. But what is it? No need to answer. Simply allow the emptiness of attention, this intimacy, to speak for itself. This surrender. The absolute fits the relative like a box and its lid. Like the air and the sunlight. Like the wind and the leaves. Like hearing and sound.

Within the listening, a listening. There is a listening _within_ the mind's attention to seemingly external sounds. It is the focus and coherence of the soul, attention itself, an intrinsic listening and waiting upon the implicate order of things, the abiding and unfolding essence in which all living, all sound, is rooted. It is the disappearance into the river of the Unborn. It is the audible life stream committed to its own rise and completion and return. It is the fulfillment and abundance of all beings.

It is the bodhisattva path. Where there is nothing left but that—no, when there is even a momentary surrender to that—our whole life can become the basket of loaves and fishes. "Tip the basket," a gentle voice calls in the breeze. See that all are fed.

# cosmology

I am a child of seeing

There is no God here but me

I can be nice to myself

I can take a bath

I can write a poem

I can walk these rooms

With the intelligence that

Love bestows.

I am none other than you

I always embrace you

In your newest form.

Brushing my teeth

Millions of universes are

Saved. Every day

Is a new day.

# Commentary: "cosmology"

I am a child of Seeing. There is no God here but me. This is not an atheistic poem. It is no different than St. Catherine of Genoa exclaiming, "My 'me' is God!" Or, as Swami Muktananda expressed it, "God dwells within you as you." Or we may cite the story of the great American mystic Joel S. Goldsmith. One day he welcomed a woman into his office who was wanting to talk about God. "Oh, and what do you _know_ about God?" Goldsmith asked. "Well," the woman said, "I know that I am a part of God." "My dear madam," Goldsmith replied tenderly, "you are the whole of God."

These are not intended as humanistic niceties. Nor as ego-inflation. They encourage us to awaken to the true nature of our relationship to the Divine; and to the whole structure of the "cosmos" as we embody it—which is why this poem is called "cosmology." Krishna says in the Bhagavad Gita, "Look for me within because I am you, even more than you are." How does Krishna, or the Divine, manifest in us? It manifests _as_ us through our _presumption of being_ that evaporates the dramas of separating, contracting, and withholding. This is what I sometimes call "bodhi-chutzpah." Bodhi is the illumination that we are nothing. Chutzpah is the willingness to be everything. To be present as and for everything. This is not an egoic chutzpah. It is actually a form of surrender, to let the divine manifest, and to presume love. We realize, in fact, that God is doing and being everything, but not as something other than ourselves.

The Sufi sage Ibn Arabi says, with some zen sleight of hand, "When you see what is around you as not other than you, and all and everything as the existence of the One—when you do not see anything else with Him or in Him, but see Him in everything as yourself and at the same time as the nonexistence of yourself—then indeed truly you see yourself and know yourself."

Sometimes the great Buddha Samantabhadra, the pure and total and creative presence that is the universe, whose Being we are, "allows" a great transparency to overcome us, in which we see inwardly and outwardly only that great empty, loving, and creative spaciousness of his original being, with no distinction of creator or created. Our very mind and body is that body of pregnant emptiness. The body of Samantabhadra. He is supremely loving to His own Self, which is all manifestation. Listen very carefully, because I am right now telling you exactly who we are. Whatever else you were told.

We are both the child and the "whole" of that loving awareness. Every time we are good to ourselves, every time we write a poem or take a bath or take care of our children or are good to each other, we are exercising our function and privilege as Samantabhadra. This is our natural intelligence and love. We are Samantabhadra embracing Samantabhadri, awareness embracing manifestation. You, yourself, I embrace in whatever manner you may next appear before me, in an infinite universe of worlds within worlds. Even when we brush our teeth the power of our liberating intention ripples through all these worlds. Samantabhadra can save all sentient beings with the lift of his sleeve as easily as I am handing you a cup of tea. And he does. I am.

# Not the Next Moment

Not the next moment, but this,

will break over you like

a waterfall, will carry you into the ecstasy

of what you already are and thought

you were only getting ready

to become, if one day you were good enough.

You wanted to go deeper. But God

has already gone deeper

by becoming you.

# Commentary: "Not the Next Moment"

This poem was written for a participant during one of our intensive retreats here in Maine. After several days of relaxed and surrendered awareness, and open-eyed, open-hearted communication, the membrane of the mind stretched thin, even as all the "stuff" of our life keeps rising up and slowly dissipating: we are in a very ripe moment of availability for a delicious accident. The mind may have a righteous plan for becoming worthy of realization, while still wanting to hold the last threads of its constructs together. But it slips and falls into something more beautiful.

The final distance that we have imagined and maintained—emotionally, cognitively, and perceptually—between our image of ourselves and our simple, actual reality is suddenly unsupportable. God rushes in as who we've always been. Buddha nature or Christ nature or tree/waterfall nature is simply expressed as us. This is our natural inheritance. It invites us to become not as beautiful as we will be, but as beautiful as we are.

Dogen Zenji said that if we can rest in surrendered awareness on the self, we will naturally see through the self altogether. Then all things speak to us as the true body of our infinite being. Even now the mind may read this description and think, "I want that someday." But it is not the next moment, but _this,_ that is breaking over you with the truth of who you already are. And you who are reading this are not the exception.

# When the Poet's Eyes

When the poet's eyes open

the world is seen as visible song;

and the poet lifts the merest passage

or refrain from all the notes

that carry her away,

and passes her days as a wind harp,

content only when she has rung true.

# Commentary: "When the Poet's Eyes"

The poet is the one who instinctively grasps interconnectedness beyond the mind's clumsy attempts to sort, label, and analyze. That poet lives in _each of us._ She is sometimes kept in the ashes by her imperial and demeaning stepsisters, who insist on making all shoes fit their size. But in the end only she has the foot graceful and innocent enough to hold the golden slipper of reality.

When her eyes are open, the world appears as visible song. Every moment it newly carries her away. And what is song, after all? It exists in the singing. Can it be nailed down and still be a song? It is a song only when it is free to be itself. And when the poet's eyes open, she understands herself to be an active participant in that song.

The song is present in its entirety, yet each poet can lift only a word or a verse from it. There is bodily delight in translating whatever small pattern of the song has arranged itself in her awareness. But she cannot capture it. She can only sing. She is aware that her language is poetry; is mythology. It is a creative response to being. And so the poem can take true joy in the alchemy of expression. The poem knows it is participating in one wisp of the great hologram of the mutually reflecting, mutually inclusive, jeweled net of being. As that wisp, it includes the whole. And, as such, the poet is a devotee. She is a devotee of reality, arising howsoever it may in this moment.

Because reality leaps, the poem leaps. Because reality has no fixed face, the poem has no fixed face. Because reality is not afraid of contradiction, the poem is not afraid of contradiction. Because reality reveals connection, the poem reveals connection. Because reality doesn't stand outside itself, the poem doesn't stand outside itself. Because reality is endlessly a metaphor of itself, the poem doesn't presume to stand above metaphor and myth. Because reality sings, the poem sings.

All language is representative, is myth, is metaphor, yet has an actual reference in our experience. That is, it is a container for truth it can never literally express. The myth and the language is alive and potent insofar as it holds the energy of that unspeakable and poetic truth that cannot honestly be conceived by the mind, and yet ever invites and instructs our participation in it. Language and myth is a holy vessel that is employed in the initiation and transmission of consciousness—and that is preliminary to, or in partnership with, our immediate and nonconceptual experience of reality. Myth keeps in fluid form those liquid truths that the mind cannot own—until such time, and on such occasions, as direct awareness supersedes. Hence the liquid form of truth is poetry, which holds it in trust for those occasions of direct awareness.

At its finest sensibility poetry is virtually inseparable from direct awareness—a final nudge of the mind over the cliff of just seeing. But, more commonly, the mind errs in trying to own the myth—or own the language—as literal. It tries to hold on to the song. And then what held the fluid potentiality and interconnectedness of experience gets converted into fixed image. This error, this flattening, occurs as we literalize the poetry of our everyday language; and it occurs en large as we literalize the great poetry of the spiritual traditions and teachings. There are so many languages of the spirit; and we disown a part of ourselves—and the spirit—if we do not recognize them all as part of the true poetry that is greater than the mind can own. When the poet's eyes are asleep with literalism and the inheritance of fixed understanding, he lives in a world subject only to divisiveness and to previous conditioning. But when the poet's eyes open, the visible song, the spontaneous poetic matrix of all life opens to him with inspiration. That is, he receives the spirit.

Not standing apart, the poet instinctively recognizes the great reciprocity built into every echo of the song. And we all awaken within that same reciprocity, though our poems may differ. The poem of reciprocity is in the heart of the ancient deer hunter as he carefully lays down the bones and antlers and repeats the blessing that will restore the Deer. He is sunk deep in the poem as he enters the mystery of the deer on whom his life depends. And he does what he must that the deer spirit may continue to live and manifest the deer that is _all_ life. In a parallel way, however different, the Sufi (says Ibn Arabi) restores and gives life to God by holding God in her heart. For God is _needing_ such a heart by which He may live. And Jewish tradition tells us that God can only become whole again through _tikkun,_ the restorative work of human beings.

Form itself, says the lama, lighting his butter lamps, gives life to the emptiness out of which it appears, as emptiness gives life to form. For they are not other than each other. Reality, says the quantum physicist, upheld by countless experiments, consists of superimposed probabilities until _we_ observe it. _Then_ it _is._ And in the _beginning,_ say the Vedas, was That One, and yet—it adds mysteriously—it was the poets that sang That One into being. Are these not all part of the same mystery of reciprocity at every level of language, manifestation, and participation? "I remember you remembering me remembering you," exclaim the Mayans. This mutual recognition is also the mystery of _darshan,_ the gaze between God and the soul; the gaze between Me and You; the gaze between me and the red oaks, clustered in dwarf communities along the shore, as I tie a poem in their upper branches as an offering for their mothering or wisdom, or ask to sit in their counsel of wind song.

"I am wind, you are fire," cries Rumi. That could be God's voice speaking to us; or our voice speaking to God. _That_ wind is needed for our fire, and our wind is needed for _that_ fire. Rumi, whose humanity and whose _bodhi-chutzpah_ is fully actualized, is not only a wind harp. He has taken on the function of wind. We are the form that reveals emptiness. We are the prayer that feeds the gods. We are _each_ the poet whose eyes and voice are needed to reveal, and create, the song. So there is no backing out. Whatever the language, it is the poet's passion to be cocreator, lover, and conscious participant. Until we speak the poem that is spoken through us, it does not exist as such. It is potential. It is unnamed Tao.

Because God, Sophia, Samantabhadra, the Dharmadhatu, Ra, the Deer Goddess, the divine, _is_ the poet in us, the poet is fluent in all the languages and all the names of the divine. Because the poet is the troubadour of the spaciousness of pure and total presence, she is not stuck on one side of yes or no. Because she is open to everything she does not need to add anything. Because she sees nothing, she does not have to eliminate anything. Because her poetic sensibility is full, she can celebrate the earth, she can celebrate the goddess in the life of all things, she can celebrate the hidden and incalculable godhead, the Christ, and the Tao of this moment. She can bathe in the river. It is the glorious mystery of the whole poem that is the poet's delight—the infinite, unobstructed, interpenetrating, and inclusive reality that is beyond the mind's capacity to name or to second-guess. It reveals itself in whatever we are giving our true attention to. It will keep us in poetry forever.

So-called "nonduality" is the song as it is—however it is—when we don't pretend to separate through knowing or judging. The pure and total presence of this song is already at hand. Love is its affirmation and self-witness. Though the mind likes to move away and speculate and engage in spiritual debate on the subject of duality or nonduality, duality is simply the activity of the mind itself when it tries to step outside the poem in order to own it. Then it chases after _itself._

In our sophisticated thinking civilization, thought is deified. The thinking mind—east or west—when compelled to narrow logic, judgment, literalism, or objectification, generates, and can't rescue us from, the illusory and provisional experience and conviction of duality or separation. Poetic participation in the great cyclic life of things is left behind, and direct experience is below the radar. When the poet's eyes close, when we separate and we forget—when we exist outside the matrix, the womb of this grand poetry—we become desperate.

That desperation aggravates a collective separation from our soil and from the ground of our experience. It aggravates the conceptual possibility of annihilation, and of the thoughts that sunder heaven and earth, being and not being. Then there is dilemma. Then there is anxiety. Then there is birth and death. Then there is the urge to annihilate. Then there is the path to survival, to aggrandizement, and to domination. Then, we think, there is the path to enlightenment. Is there?

Beneath the strata of the categories of the thinking mind, there is only the embracing mind. There is only the awake mind. There is only the suchness of participation and direct experience. There is only poetry. Side by side with forgetfulness, this poetry has arisen in exquisite form in every time and place. When I stand before one good poem—be it Inuit, Russian, Persian, Navajo, or Sumerian—I am brought to my knees by a great vajra rattle that shakes my mind free. The sacred comes riding up from the earth, or down from the sky, on a great white chariot of no mind that is the immediacy of earth and spirit in which all things are free to live their _great interpenetrating life_ beyond the crazed separation of being or nothingness, God or no God, duality or nonduality.

Truly in the east

the white bean

and the great corn-plant

are tied with the white lightning.

Listen! Rain approaches.

That from the Navajo, and this too:

The magpie! Here

underneath in the white of his wings—

the footsteps of morning.

It dawns! It dawns!

This is the great poetic sensibility that will preserve the world. It is the very Divine. The wind blows over the hillside, and it is the grass and the trees that give it song. Or the old man's beard. Or the wind harp. _Prajnaparamita_ is infinite song. And we are that song giving life to itself through the truth of our attention and the faithfulness of our eyes and our ears and our voice, just as a wind harp gives song to the wind.

As poets we are tied like the bean and the corn to the white lightning. Our wings are brushed with morning. As we open our eyes in the present; as we surrender our separation from the Unnamable in all things; as we recognize the Beloved and know it to be ourselves; as we offer our prayer in the sanctuary of our hearts; as we offer our jade and our song to the flowing waters and to the spirits of the earth; as we let the wind blow through; as we simply and truly perform our half of the poetic function: we actualize the great sympathetic reciprocity between ourselves and the divine.

Then we have truly fed what feeds us. Then we have rung true.

# I Guess I'm Lucky

I am lucky that sunlight

casts the shadow of the waving spruce

across my wall;

that wind sends the prayer flags

into my field of view,

and bare maples

make a mosaic of sky.

I am lucky that phenomena

rise and fall

beyond my need to protest;

that empires are fragile

and the earth is old;

that people will

always

make foolish decisions

and are always

worth loving.

That poets will laugh together

across the centuries—

this morning, Han Shan:

"On a pathway made of sand,

it is hard to make mudballs."

# Commentary: "I Guess I'm Lucky"

On my sitting cushion, sunlight from the window behind me casts the shadow of the wavering spruce boughs on the far wall. This morning I see even the shadow of a squirrel jumping from branch to branch. Plato warned that all of our knowing was a mere seeing of shadows on the cave wall. But from where I sit it's pretty okay. I have no intention to chase after that shadow squirrel. The shadows on the wall only make me smile in recognition of what is real, allowing me to enjoy this play as an expression of the sun itself.

Who am I that I should be here to see these things at all? That I get to enjoy this theater of beauty and tenderness? Out the window in front of me, on that same wall, I watch as the wind playfully lifts the line of prayer flags into my view. The bare March maples are like a filigree, making a mosaic pattern of the sky. But the sky does not complain to appear this way; it does not complain that for a moment it is made to appear as fractured glass, that its vastness is framed as discrete shapes. The infinite does not hesitate to appear as a fraction of itself; to be subject to our perspective. In reality it is still everywhere. And as I relax my focus and my perspective I see that, of course, I am sitting in the sky right now.

Like this lovely spring wind, like the prayer flags lifting and dancing, one awareness dances and never congeals. The trees move in the wind and the mosaic of sky constantly shape-shifts. The mosaic of my life, the rise and fall of phenomena, shifts as continually as these branches in the sky. They are also shadows on the cave wall. And I would be most foolish to think that I could orchestrate this dance of phenomena according to some plan; or if I were to protest this dancing of trees in the wind.

The teaching of The Four Noble Truths is right here. When I protest, whatever form it takes, it generates suffering. Reality is not impressed by it. When I recognize the true nature of phenomena and the true nature of protest, the need for protest dissipates, and the way of affirmation may naturally arise. That way is to start again, each moment, with the simple embrace of being, undiminished by the instinctive need to grasp or to protest. That way is to persist as love, which is the ultimate mature capacity of our species. Unentranced with phenomena, we learn that the only thing there is to grasp after is _being,_ which is ungraspable and already here. The only thing there is to protest is _being,_ which is absurd. What we are left with, then, is a fundamental friendship with phenomena, an awareness full of friendliness. This way of friendship is as old as the earth; and older than empires.

Empires come and go across the face of the earth, forged of our protest and of our grasping. We create empires of the mind and then empires of nations. There is something intrinsic to a certain historical stage of our personal and cultural development that tricks us out of our indigenous and equitable community of life by our own mental or technological ingenuity. We are adept at innovation for survival and for enhanced comfort, but addicted in the end to projections of power and wealth. Complexity leads to political and economic hierarchy and then to rigidity. Both hierarchy and rigidity lead to disregard of others and of the communities of life. This has long been the challenge of our cultural evolution, demanding a genuine, radical, and earth-including spiritual counterweight. It is hard to sustain a universal and harmonious point of view that balances collective well-being with personal advancement. Thus do such teachers as Tsongkhapa, the teacher of the first Dalai Lama, plead for us to distinguish in all things between those actions that negate the preciousness of others and those actions that affirm and judiciously care for others. The failure to do so, he maintained, is the fundamental source of suffering in creation—and the undermining of any "civilization."

And what is that consciousness in matter that allows for such an understanding—that awake, loving presence, that openness of the Tao, whose energy assumes form and eventually fixation? That same awakeness, the Tao itself, must come to recognize and surrender fixation so that energy may return to spirit, and spirit to awake openness. This is always the work of individuals within the context of the fixations of ego and of empire. Within ourselves as individuals, and weakly reflected at the greater communal level, there have always been awakening impulses of consciousness; and they must continually test themselves against the great inconscient inertia, the juggernaut of corrupt institutional power and the old habits of fear, anger, ignorance, and greed.

Developmental forces continue to shift in a mosaic pattern across the earth and across history, beyond our myopic predictions. Wisdom and foolishness, humanity and its degradation, continue to rise and fall in each new configuration. Of course, we in _our_ empire believe, as have all the others, that we are especially ennobled. With our self-centered disregard, with our technological hubris and entrancement, and with our (inevitably hypocritical) ideals, we believe that we have at last transcended the fate of every empire that has come before. We believe in our own mudballs on this path of sand.

We have now witnessed the spectacular rise and decline of the "American century"—a blink as empires go—and the next century may well be China's again, or who knows. New patterns and paradigms will emerge with new worldwide population and climate pressures, the end of the petroleum age, the destruction of our soil and land base, and our continued violation and blaspheming of the Water Goddess. In fact, we have succeeded in denial long enough that the whole eco-structure may be coming down on our heads like Pompeii. (Or perhaps it is fairer to say that _we_ are coming down on the heads of everything else.) The devastation caused by the arrogant business of empire may cause the earth to appear fragile. In the end, it is empires that are fragile. The earth is old. It feeds the rise of empires, but in the end makes all empires its food. Its cycles are greater than ours.

It is no surprise that our lives and the lives of empires are characterized by foolish decisions and acts. We are still barking at phenomena under the sway of fixation. We are still "missing the nectar for the lees." We are still running our show like ignorant and poorly parented children, unavailable to our own wisdom traditions. If we are not awake to the uncontrived, spontaneously present, original spaciousness of our own existence, we will always be chasing shadows on the cave wall. If we are not awake to the greater cycles of mystery and regeneration that we serve, we will create our own dead ends. If we are not awake to our own bodies as the body of the earth and the body of one another, we will continue to hack off our own hands and feet. But the awakening of consciousness only occurs in the eternal context of trial and error. And though we are foolish, we are the face of great love. If we have sincerity of heart, our own errors may awaken us. If the heart has been left behind, true learning is impossible. I am always moved by the zen master who, on his deathbed, surrounded by ardent disciples waiting to catch his last words, said, "My whole life has just been one mistake after another." What a generous teaching.

Empires rise and fall in the illusion of time. But because time is an illusion, it can never truly separate us. We can reach across the centuries for our best friends. We can share a laugh and a cup of tea with our fellow humans, who are also our fellow poets. The poet is the one in us who sometimes can't help falling back into the original and spontaneous space of being; and for a moment we are capable of living the poem, or we bring it back braided into the mane of our winged horse—as proof of the journey. The poem shines in our eyes, sparkling through the tears of both laughter and grief. We sit together on a veranda, at a cave mouth, around a camp fire, at a tea table or at a tavern outside of time. And we are praise-singers.

On my office wall sits a marvelous painting that I found in China by a contemporary artist unknown to me. It is an intriguing abstract, a magical splash and calligraphy of paint, and it can be enjoyed at that level. But as one gazes at the painting, a clear and beautiful image suddenly emerges. It is of a very courtly woman who, with great formality, is serving tea to a fox. As the mists of time clear, I too find myself gratefully extending my cup to be served by several courtly twelfth-century Chinese women. They are like spirits of the earth who offer their tea across time and the vagaries of empires, as Sun Bu-er says, "plain heart seeing into plain heart."

Sun Bu-er, wife, mother, Taoist adept, poetess, immortal, sits with me on the earth and offers me the first generous cup:

Always waiting in the clearing,

the simple image of light.

The day you see this,

that day you will become it.

She is encouraging us to let the pixie dust fall from our eyes; to see our true reflection. Beside her in the clearing is Zhou Xuanjing. Her eyes lowered, she also declares herself to be my sister as she stirs in the sugar with gentle invocation:

Under motionless waves,

Fish and dragons freely leap.

In the sky without limits

only the moonlight stays.

Yes, yes! Great space does not contain this moonlight. And dragons freely leap across the moon. I am moved beyond words by this magical convocation more real than time. Li Qingzhao looks at me squarely as she passes the server of cream with sympathetic understanding:

Hard to find words in poems to carry amazement!

On its ninety-thousand-mile wind,

the huge inner bird is soaring.

These real women and their wake-up calls are clearly not restrained or intimidated by the rise and fall of foolery or empire.

"Open the blinds" calls Cui Shaoxuan:

"the first apricot blossoms have opened—

Hurry! The spring days are now."

The spring days _are_ now. This magical scene and its visiting poets dissolve, and the wind is again blowing the prayer flags across my window. It is our good fortune to be called back to spring as the dizzying panorama of all things becomes an invitation back into our own hearts; as the dizzying dramas of the world resolve to invitations of friendship. This is our great awake community of the spirit, now and across centuries. "If you want a friend," writes ninth-century hermit Shih-Te, "just come by my mountain. Sitting deep among the crags, we'll talk about what's what."

As for Han Shan, he'll dart behind a tree or into a cave mouth before he lets me find him. But, with Shih-Te, he leaves his poems carved on cliff walls. And there are a lot more hidden poets laughing in these hills. As we turn from shadow to sunlight, from fixation to the Tao, our luck changes. Spring does not hang on the human story, and awakening does not hang on the fortunes of empire. We watch with affection the way things grow on this path made of sand. And whether we are people or empires, our mudballs are laughable.

# Here in the Ati

Spring returns again

to the Ati mountains where

spring has never left.

Winds of leaf and snow,

the seasons dance like maidens

tossing scarves in air.

Our hearts are made of

the same clear blue as the sky,

the same gentle rain.

Here in the Ati

we don't listen to the weather

channel. Just smile.

# Commentary: "Here in the Ati"

This year winter was layered thick in Maine. The snow was so insistent (and still piling high at February's end) that we locals knew it was one of those years it would stay piled into April. But spring had its own plans. A couple of effortless days of warm wind and rain in early March and the snow was virtually gone. Winter had liberated itself.

Our karmas seem to be piled high, sustained by our own beliefs and expectations. Each moment seems to add a new layer of drama and captivity. This is the weather "everyone talks about, but no one does anything about." It is the writing etched ever deeper, the knot pulled ever tighter. But here in the Ati Mountains, we understand that spring is effortlessly self-liberating in each instant. We know that all writing is on water. And every knot is a slip knot.

_Ati yoga_ is "the great perfection," the yoga of self-liberating awareness, winter instantly resolving back to spring. Throughout the playful cycling of the seasons, the rainbow-maiden dance of appearance, and the imaginary patterns of fixation, the distance between winter and spring remains: zero.

As for ourselves, we are not other than this same clear blue, the vast emptiness of sky, magically precipitating the gentle rain of compassionate activity. Our heart is that very same primordial poet of the primordial smile.

Here in Maine we know how misleading a weather report can be. How much more so if we don't suspect it is we who have been broadcasting the weather channel and keeping the weather going. Outwardly, it is important to clean up your mess. Shovel your driveway. Inwardly, know that self-liberating spring is the primordial weather, the primordial attribute of the heart/mind. The weather of no-weather. Then turn off the weather channel and hike with me into the Ati. There, every place we put our foot down is a smile.

# Dawn on Martha's Ridge

Low-flying mist

Passes the bent brow of the apple.

Radiant energy springs

Twist the fruited bough.

Wet leaves float down

across the morning screen.

The secret's hidden

Where it is most seen.

# Commentary: "Dawn on Martha's Ridge"

Walk with me along the ridge in the just-pre-dawn mist. We can feel the rising tide of the day with our whole bodies, the stir and reflection of the unborn sun already present in the thick clouds of vapor passing across the ancient apple tree. The tree has long stood on the hillside, a perfect expression of its own nature at play with the magnetic forces of earth and heaven. Feel the spiraling well of energy rising from the earth at this spot, the deity of the place, nourishing the river of our bodies even as it gives its vital expression to the uniquely twisting boughs. The hidden and the revealed reflect together in this early morning dance. In fact, they are the same. The tree itself is the very revelation of what is hidden, and which yet remains brilliantly hidden in the very open. The secret is not hidden in another realm. The secret is hidden within the spectrum of our own awareness, as we widen or narrow our ability to see.

Stand with me and relax into the wide-open screen of your awareness, the screen of all things being what they are without the mind's interference; the empty and ungraspable spaciousness in which a few wet leaves float to the earth.

The radiance is one with the fruiting. The essence and potential is one with the manifestation. The most hidden is revealed before us. The most obvious is unknowable mystery. Separate these and we sunder the mind of the universe. We abandon our full inheritance and become desperate.

Mullah Nasruddin regularly leads his donkey cart loaded with straw across the mountainous border. The suspicious border guard is convinced he is a smuggler, but no matter how diligently he searches the cart, both above and below, he never discovers anything. Years later the retired guard meets Nasruddin in a tavern and says, "Look, those years are long past. Tell me the truth, what were you smuggling?" "I was smuggling donkeys," says Nasruddin.

Once I called to God in the early morning and said, "God, you scoundrel. I know you're smuggling something of value here; but no matter how many times I go back and forth across the border, looking everywhere, I can't find anything. So tell me the truth, what are you smuggling?"

And God says, "I am smuggling you."

You and I are a revelation of the same secret. I see you lit by the same halo of the unborn sun. So I thank you for joining me here along the ridge. The light is rising now, and we two can take special delight in being here together in the mist, just becoming the mind of the morning.

Not hidden, not revealed: what is it?

It is a beautiful morning for a walk.

# early spring

red berries, turned brown,

last into spring.

the water is clear

against the shore.

the little boat

is filling up with snow.

# ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo by Joseph Rubano

PAUL WEISS lives, teaches, and wanders in the woods on the coast of Maine. He began his zen and tai chi training in New York in the mid-60s and practiced in New York and San Francisco before first coming to Maine in 1969 to live and study with Walter Nowick, one of the first American zen masters. Over the years Weiss has drunk deeply of several spiritual traditions and teachers and has studied at length in India and China. He founded The Whole Health Center with his wife, Alexandra, in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1981, where he has brought together the fruits of his broad training. Today he continues to counsel with individuals, couples, and small groups, offers many retreats—including his True Heart/True Mind Intensives—and teaches a spirituality of integrative human development and conscious loving presence. A volume of poems, _You Hold This,_ was published in 2013.

# Contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. preface
  7. the dharma as poetry
  8. Part One
    1. the drifter
    2. Morning Chill
    3. Frenchman's Bay
    4. Another Morning Song
    5. prayer flags in winter
    6. Thinking, not thinking
    7. Good News
    8. six wild geese
    9. The Prajnaparamita in Eight Lines
    10. Heart Sutra
    11. beyond sky and no sky
    12. Whitman's Truth
    13. Nothing Knows
    14. quantum mechanics
    15. A Step Ahead of the Present
    16. Along the Piscataquog
    17. The Missing Monk
    18. through the cracks in my roof
    19. the mind is autumn
    20. Sext
    21. Understanding Tom Bombadil
    22. There Is No Woman
    23. you think your future
    24. Already happened
  9. Part Two
    1. Benediction
    2. The Song That Is Before
    3. Go to the Limit
    4. Just Sitting
    5. If He Is True
    6. Make No Mistake
    7. Just as I Lift
    8. the nothing at the heart of the world
    9. Ho!
    10. the old tree
    11. we are here to transmit virtue
    12. The Congo Women
    13. I Want This Delight for You
    14. When I first saw my face
    15. Simple Prayer
    16. Epitaph
    17. cosmology
    18. Not the Next Moment
    19. When the Poet's Eyes
    20. I Guess I'm Lucky
    21. Here in the Ati
    22. Dawn on Martha's Ridge
    23. early spring
    24. about the author

## Guide

  1. Copyright
  2. Title Page
  3. Table of Contents
  4. Cover

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  2. ii
  3. iii
  4. iv
  5. v
  6. vi
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  8. viii
  9. ix
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaBook