Who am I ?-a Journey

the infinite iterations of being

The most beautiful thing that happened to me this last week was that I flew like a bluejay. Or rather, I went with him as he dove, and suddenly I knew exactly what he was feeling. I was able to detect that the fear was mine. He, a circus acrobat, was completely calm. Leaning forward as if to fall, he felt no hesitation abandoning himself to the air. I gasped out loud. My wings opened up and stayed steady, forming an arrow. With my face, pointing toward the branch that was my goal, I moved with electric precision, and landed flawlessly. Moments later, too short to form a sentence, he was at my feeder, cocking his head to one side as if to consider my admiration.

What a stunning joy it must it be to live three dimensionally.

In dreams, it is the will stirs us. We move through out desires and dreads, motorized by that subterranean layer of our psyche; the unconscious. This mysteriousness that we are knows us better than we do. We, who take ourselves to be the drivers, have forgotten that we are the dreaming, and what our future holds. The future is already written in the logic of our choices. We claw at it, this unknown and known future, so that we might wrestle some wisdom before we act. And yet, although it is also us, our unconscious shares its gifts sparingly.

Is it the muscle or the thought that moves the leg? Dreamers and bluejays move with their hearts.

Compelled to clean my computer desktop,

I discover a slip of a journal entry from 4 years ago. It says, simply, I am the one longing to go home where home is being (with) the divine, and time is the eternal now.

In music, the listener isn’t focused only on a single note. His mind unifies the music so that each note reverberates in every other note until the blend of time, silence and sound creates music.

If you listen closely to your own thoughts, you will see it is the same with a moment. There is no moment alone outside of context. Each moment is a blend of wisdom and foolishness; beginner’s mind and a master’s transcendence. Although it is popular nowadays to be present only to the moment where the moment is felt to be just your immediate sensations and perceptions, I am not sure this collapse of awareness really yields the mystery its practitioners seek. Rather, it is a starting point. Pausing to notice just the butterfly and the branch, the whisper of breeze or the heat of the sun brings relief, but it is not the relief of the redemption of moments; the fold in the universe that both unites and finally brings clarity to all experience. It’s not celestial music unless the fathomlessness of being is known.

I have a book by the Buddhist teacher, Dogen called Moon in the Dewdrop. I think this title does more to express the eternal now than the collapse into the moment that many practice these days. Seeing the moon in the dewdrop is a much better description of deep presence. Here the vastness is reflected in the tiniest of occasions. The moment is eternity, the individual is the all. It is this awareness that frees.

Although my favorite paintings are my simplest ones,

I find it surprisingly hard to attain. Enchanted by the brush and the sweep of color, and the changes I can bring about with my play; before too long I have immersed myself in a mess of color that obscures any of the clarity I sought. Like a cluttered moment in time, I need to scrape it all back until I can find the original idea-and the original idea is Nothingness. But even Nothingness needs to be revealed with the painter’s art. Briefly, I bring back a litany of other discoveries-the joy of something appearing from nothing in my hands when I worked with clay, the happy surprise of my sunflowers bursting taller and taller in my garden, moving in the wind and charming seed-seeking birds. Even the slow and stately fading of the red points my Japanese maples display as they soften down for the season tells the story. You cannot keep anything, and yet you have it all.

I want to paint the eternal now. I have a brush, color, a surface and this moment. I start with the certainty that this occasion can reveal it, but only when my attention is sharp, clear, essential. What color is it, what texture? What form am I, how briefly am I here? Can I see the moon in the dewdrop before the evaporation of my time robs me of my chance?

Namaste,

Leslie

Exercise

Ask yourself who, or even better, what you are. Try to answer as accurately as you can reflecting your experience of being alive. When Descartes answered, he came up with I think therefore I am. Offer your most fundamental and truthful description of what you are. If you do this very carefully, and with great attention, you may be surprised. Please share your answer with me in the comments.