Rough winds pass through bare branches, nothing to hold on to, winter morning first light. Snow plow passes up Barnestown Road. Maine Coon cat paws at my arm, climbs to chest, probably wants to be let out. Settles to stare at bedroom door.
We appear and disappear.
There is a net of three dimensions, vast and wide stretching in all four directions throughout the universe. At each point that a string meets another point of the net there is a jewel, and this jewel reflects in it all the other jewels of the entire net, and further that reflection too is reflected in all the facets of all the other jewels.
No single part of the net can be independent of the rest; a single movement of the net in one place will affect, in some way, the most distant part of the net or universe. The all is reflected in the one, the one in the all.
- The Avatamsaka Sutra, in Dailyzen
We have the desire to say: 'I have been here.' It is difficult to embrace the desire to: 'Leave no trace.'
The signature of the wind through branches is a shudder submitting to following silence.
Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind--
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere.
- Han-Shan, circa 630
(in, The Enlightened Heart, edited by Stephen Mitchell, p. 30)
I'm no longer attracted by anything other than this -- this feeling, this thought, this sound, this place, this person, this question. This question asks:"What
is this?"
Woodman’s interest in self-presentation—and self-preservation—emerges even in a note written around the time of her first suicide attempt. “I finally managed,” she explains, “to try to do away with myself, as neatly and concisely as possible…. I would rather die young leaving various accomplishments, some work, my friendship with you, and some other artifacts intact, instead of pell-mell erasing all of these delicate things.” Woodman reverses the traditional terms of the arrangement: death, like photography, is simply a series of chemical reactions. Living is “erasing”; dying a way of ensuring that what was will continue to be, of fixing certain things in place. When Woodman died, she left behind an unpublished artist’s book, a set of five images, called Portrait of a Reputation.
(from, The Long Exposure of Francesca Woodman, by Elizabeth Gumport, New York Review of Books, 24Jan2011)
In churches and mosques, temples and monasteries the ancient prayers and rituals are carefully observed. I'm glad of this. In this room at foot of two mountains the observation is of what is here.
We will go to Merton Retreat, sit in silence, chant psalms, listen to words weaving through bare attention, finally to shudder and submit to moving through the next thing we do as what we are in the passage.
Snow plow returns down valley sluice. Clouds part and parse nascent sunlight, close again, converse with wind.
If love is all with all in all, I am in the sound of the birds chipping at ice on roof outside window.
I am in the sound of what we call...God.
