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
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
echoes from emptiness 