I look outside the window right now and see maple trees with orange and reddish yellow leaves reaching into a tender blue sky. And lower down, green leaves, with burnt red Virginia creeper clinging to maples all cabled together with grape vines. And lower still, deutzia and lilac and honeysuckle.
But just five hours ago, none of this. The moon was out, and the night was day. After waking up unexpectedly at 5 AM, I looked out a window and didn’t know what year or millennia it was. There before me was something ancient. The trees and bushes were all constituted of shadows, timeless shadows. And the rest was silvered by a unique light, a softened glow.
During the day, we see the ten thousand things of the world distinguished by specific details and the spaces between them. But in the moonlight, the edges grew fainter. There was light and shadow, but nothing else sharply divided or defined. Everything was softened and somehow linked. Nothing stood on its own; the whole scene was so engrossing. And the moonlight made mind light, made all my thoughts and feelings, so noticeable.
And then this morning I picked up a book I had been reading a week or so ago, Hunger Mountain: A field Guide to Mind and Landscape by David Hinton. It describes walks he had taken on Hunger Mountain in Vermont and includes discussions both of Chinese poetry he had translated and of Taoist cosmology inspiring those walks.
In the first chapter of the book was a poem I had read before; it was by the Chinese poet, Tu Fu, titled “Moonrise”. I read again about the new moon, and the ancient, changeless “Star River” and “White/dew dusts the courtyard.” And I realized that last night it was Tu Fu looking out my window.
We normally think of things at a distance. Words can do that. They are abstractions, usually. And we are the distance the words create, or what distances. We think of ourselves in a manner that separates us from whom we speak to or about. We all have thoughts, plans, dreams, sensations, emotions filling our mind and heart. The ego self is what glues us to some of these stimuli and excludes us from the rest.
Many people would argue that it wasn’t Tu Fu looking out the window. He’s dead. It was just that my buried memory of the poem influenced how I interpreted the moonlight I perceived and how I saw the earth, trees, and bushes. I was clearly in a dream intoxicated state. But last night, a different vision occurred. The moon met and befriended the poet. For a second or two, the thing seen met the act of seeing and became the seer.
And maybe this is what meditation and poetry, or any conscious writing or speaking can do for us. It can reveal what was hidden so we can learn from and choose what to hold and to be. Writing and speaking can be a way to step out of our normal self and into the cauldron, or moonlight. When the word spoken or written is sincere, honest, there is no wall. There is no translator, no separation.
Words are funny, tender things. They teeter closely on the edge between the unformed and the concrete. They’re silent, nothing unless a person gives them substance. They’re nothingness given shape by mind and heart ⎼ and the history and culture living in that mind and heart.
Joan Sutherland, in her book Forests of Every Color, Awakening with Koans, shares and further elucidates this vision. She talks about language as a way to begin moving from the deep, vast, silent, and ineffable reality to one of form, substance, sound, and definition. We do this especially with metaphor. In a sincere meditation, mindfulness, or writing practice, we don’t limit by using words that kill or blind. We use words that flower, that are like megaphones to silence, that expose what things “are like.” That breathe. And when we speak, we are molding, compressing the very air into shapes and sizes that embrace and stand us up so we can face even the most bitter winds.
And when we are thusly sincere in our speech, when we are clear, when we are meeting the moment openly, it’s like we’re not speaking at all. We don’t know what we’ll say. The words just come. The divisions in and around us heal. We can just step back and emerge into something new; we surprise ourselves. When it’s not just us by ourselves, not a separate individual doing it, we’re so much more ready and able to face whatever happens in the world.
Hinton talks about meditation as turning perception into a spiritual act. Each person, alone, distinguished from all our usual means of identifying or distancing ourselves, becomes attentive, open; we become like a mirror, reflecting back what is seen. Everything is perceived as utterly and simply itself; sufficient; clear. Nothing lacking.
Here are two visions or ways of envisioning⎼ as form, creation, individual things, vs unformed, possible, interdependent. One separates and divides yet enlightens intellectually. The other softens the edges and lets all things speak through us. It can enlighten emotionally, yet can be frightening, empty, overwhelming, in that it can include everything that is or could be, interdependent, as a whole.
Each vision needs the other. Without the 10,000 things, as Chinese poets describe it, or without each individual thing, there is no whole to soften. Without touching the universe in ourselves, there is no real self to touch.
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This Post is republished on Medium.
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