no longer working to get free
(or fix or heal or please)
no longer needing to understand
how any of this is possible
not to mention
knowable
I rest
entirely wrapped
in wonderment
Photo by ml:
A recently completed small work, a candle, my mother’s ashes, a daffodil, an apple and a magic arrow
2021 covid lockdown, Aotearoa New Zealand
The invasion was unexpected and uninvited; it happened
one numinous now
when the minder of memories had her back turned.
In crept wild wideawakeness, sleuthing
through this dormitory of sleeping stories,
slipping from cocoon to cocoon
dubbing each bedded-down memory
with its diamond dagger and pronouncing each one
an esteemed and luminous Member of the Matrix.
It lifted up the wounded and the weary,
the lost and lonesome, the betrayed
and the broken, saying
To know this pain, beloved
is to know That which is beyond time
for That alone has the capacity to be aware
and in your naked awareness of your pain
you are naturally ever-enlightened.
You imagine your enlightenment to be
other than this wretchedness –
you take it as proof that you
haven’t yet “made the shift”
yet how could pain (or pleasure) be known
if enlightenment were not fully present?
By what function of cognition
would you aware this knowing?
By both logic and experience it’s found
that the unlit light of awareness
is prior to every sensory perception.
Will you stay tucked up in your cocoon
dreaming of the mirage of your awakening
shimmering in some distant space and time
or will you blink now
and own up to your feral freedom?
I blinked.
– ml, 2012
Tantric Painting, India, c1800 or earlier, detail
This post was originally published on my blog this unlit light in October 2012.
I don’t know what it is.
I can’t meet it face-to-face.
I can’t turn my back on it.
It’s impossible to flee from it.
If, by some wild grace
(I don’t know what that is, either)
it turns its all-knowing eye upon itself,
the default idea of duality
(by which I mean the unquestioned compulsion to label, define and separate)
vaporises.
Even the concept of ‘one’ is clearly one idea too many.
Knowing without a centre, without a knower,
knows.
It excludes nothing. It has no preferences.
Separation ceases.
The old urge to know what it is,
how it is, why it is,
has become irrelevant, obsolete, laughable.
I say: here it is. Show me how you can possibly ignore it.
– ml
2021
Painting by Michael Leunig, Desert Song Man
try as I might
to find a then and a when
in this ever-spinning cosmos
the needle of now
stays stuck in its groove
.
now – this – here: unpacking the ‘nth dimension’
Art by Fiona Watson, Music of the Spheres
https://www.fionawatson.co.uk/
–
It must have been more than 50 years ago.
I was a newbie meditator and yogini when my teacher threw this curved ball:
“Pray for disappointment.
Disappointment is the highest teacher.”
Gulp. I thought I was signing up for Transcendence 101, not some advanced course in self-mortification.
Please explain, I asked, and she did:
Disappointment will unpick your stories.
It will shatter your certitudes.
It will strip you of hope.
It will lead you to the other side of the assumptions you unknowingly live by.
(It will be a huge shock to realise that the only free and true choice you can ever make is to stop, shut up, listen and open.)
If you can live with its inevitability, it will deliver you to unbreakable peace and equanimity. You will understand the real meaning of trust and you will make impermanence your touchstone.
No fatalism or nihilism involved – no ‘isms’ whatsoever.
No ideology, therapy or frantic god-bothering required.
{ pure gold }
Well, as it happened, she was right.
Did I ever offer up a prayer of invitation to disappointment?
Not that I recall, but I’ve always been a bit contrary, and I was definitely curious.
Everyone was hunting for the enlightenment cookie via his or her own tendencies and patterns – I guess I was too. In hindsight it’s clear that my fierce wild-maned Cincinnati yoga teacher (who was managing my return to mobility after having my right leg severed in an accident) was introducing me to the Via Negativa, to the ancient Vedic Neti Neti inquiry.
And so far as the gods of disappointment were concerned,
my ingenuous curiosity was enough to catch their attention.
Off I went, from one knee-grazer to the next.
Sometimes they served up the prompt in the midst of the mishap, accident, heartache, bust-up, betrayal, rejection. Sometimes it would show up in the aftermath. But it never failed to arrive, scribbled in gold on the back of an increasingly tattered calling card:
What knows this,
ceaselessly, inescapably,
while remaining entirely unaffected?
a h h h h h . . .
s y s t e m – r e s t o r e
{ pure gold }
I bow before disappointment’s wild grace.
Speaking personally, mls.
Notes:
Sometimes a poem calls forth an image; sometimes an image elicits a poem. I’ve been keeping company with this Kintsugi sculpture by Billie Bond for a while, waiting to see if words might line themselves up in response to its powerful eloquence. What showed up surprised me. While I have been blessed with untold good fortune, generosity and joy in my life, I confess that it was the unspeakably harrowing experiences that opened up intimacy with the entire field of experience. So I’m posting this in case it matches the shape of a wound that needs loving attention. We all have them. And we are the world.
From September 18, 2013: a love letter to disappointment
Sculpture:
Billie Bond, Kintsugi Head 1, 2014
H32 W22 D15
Black stoneware, resin, epoxy, gold leaf
Unique
http://www.billiebondart.com/kintsugi-sculpture.html
Kintsugi – “golden joinery” also known as Kintsukuroi – “golden repair”, is the ancient Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. As a philosophy it sees beauty in imperfection; it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
The knowing of Knowing
is the sweetest somatic intimacy, the ultimate G[od]-spot.
It’s no wonder poets pen passionate love-notes
to their beloved Beloved.
It’s more evident than any revelation,
more obvious than anything observed.
Yet this seamless saturation is neither an experience
nor anything that could be called an attainment.
It’s prior to consciousness,
to memory, to perception, to imagination.
(I say “prior to” but I don’t mean a-p-a-r-t from.
Perhaps precursory would be a better word.)
How mysterious that it’s completely overlooked, ignored,
while at the same time
hungered for/longed for/searched for/worked for/studied for/meditated for/practiced for/prayed for/paid for, in time, devotion and sacrifice . . .
What a joke!
No GPS can locate it.
Yet it’s inescapable.
I don’t need a guru, method, scripture, sledgehammer
to wake up to the fact that whatever I am
is unarguably and precisely whatever I perceive, experience, feel.
I only have to look from a silent mind.
To acknowledge this Knowing –
to abide as it, to act as it –
restores me to the all-inclusive immensity
I knew all along.
All along.
Since breath #1 was gasped on a summer’s morning in 1944
and these innocent eyes first opened
onto the mindscape
before
words like suffering and salvation were sown there
sprouting addictive fantasies
about enlightenment, transcendence, escape
before
I was thought-washed to believe that
the embodiment of this Knowing
would erase every discomfort and dysfunction from my experience
before
the dark net of distinctions descended
before
I learned to be clever.
– miriam louisa
Artwork by Jean-Michel Meurice
Urgell 1, 2004
Acrylic on fabric, 215 x 215cm
More info HERE
I love the way this work portrays the richness of our circular existence, the dance of the dreamer around the still, silent core. It’s a wonderful example of contemporary Tantric art.
It’s been a year of farewells: a brother, an artist comrade, and now another old buddy from my peer-group has gone.
Again I meet the temporality, the impermanence of this experience of being alive.
Again something rises to state the actuality of my experience – not to comfort or console, but to remind myself that everything appearing is a window onto the everlastingly unaffected.
So what?
So that whatever life dishes up has some small chance of being met with honesty and presence. So that I might be sane enough to remember that my wishes – no matter how profound – have nothing to do with what-is. So that I might see directly, act appropriately.
I’m ok with old age. The need to change anything falls away. Candles in the wind.
Yet (occasionally) (rarely these days) I’m moved to share a confession. You never can tell, it might be the last one. And there are things I want to say before I go.
Thank you for reading.
This is what I love about fog:
space is rendered opaque
so I get to see
Creation’s cauldron,
to see the emptiness I ordinarily move through
oblivious
to its strange solidity.
I had it all back to front –
assuming my solidity and its, well, nothingness.
One night a few months ago I asked how
Dōgen’s “aware space” *
might be made evident, physically perceivable,
experience-able beyond conceptualization
and next morning I woke up to thick fog.
I thought, OK let’s color it pink
to make it even more evident
– no problem for a visual mind like mine –
but then I noticed that my hands,
the exhalation of my breath,
my table, my room, my coffee,
everything was permeated with pinkness.
In high school science class I was taught:
An atom consists of 99.9999999999996% “empty space”
and should all the “empty space”
be vacuumed out of one’s body
the solid matter remaining would fit
on the point of a pin.
(Along with all those dancing quantum angels.)
And I lost it, almost wet myself laughing . . .
“You mean . . .?”
I’m leaving it to you, dear reader,
to join the dots for yourself.
If you do, you’ll never again be puzzled
by the paradox of the Prajñāpāramitā.
– – –
That’s how teachings arrive for me:
a question goes out
and the universe serves a set-up
perfectly calibrated for comprehension
by this old cow’s unique version
of craziness.
Mu!
Painting by UK artist Alan Perriman, Fog – one of a series where he sets out to express in visual language a short Japanese poem.
Because fog engulfs
the house where I am
I feel as though
I have floated into the sky
– Myōe
1173-1232
* Dōgen’s “Aware Space”:
I was sitting with a commentary on Dōgen zenji’s Being Time, given by Anzan Hoshin roshi.
He said, “Dōgen is pointing out the way Aware Space embodies itself as each of you, and how each of you unfold yourselves as each other and as all things, as all beings, all times, all worlds.”
Gulp. God I love Dōgen.
White Wind Zen Community, Ottawa.
echoes from emptiness 