to understand reality as a direct experience

14 February 2004 - 11:34

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

[Every moment] it's a new season, a new day, a new life, so we'll give him a new name: Kale. Kale told me about a recurring dream where he is between two unimaginably dense metal slabs, millions of miles long and wide and thick. The slabs slowly close on him, crushing him with a force and finality so great as to make concrete into the abstract, and he found the terror of it unbearable until he had this thought:

With a gap that infinitesimal, how far would my flattened body spread? Into forever, maybe?

*
November 3 (my birthday) to Valentine's Day. Redding. Chico. Tracy. Stockton. Placerville. Tahoe. Fairfield. Vacaville. San Francisco. Bakersfield. Porterville. Lancaster. Palmdale. Hollywood, Los Angeles. San Diego. San Jose. Like a dandelion seed on the wind.

*
In San Jose (and in Portland, I'm told) there is a clanging, whirling machine that uses gravity to send billiard balls on a myriad of metal paths. You never know from the top what path a ball will take: it depends on what every ball before it has done. Reversals of direction, downward spirals, calamity abound. If you are thinking from the past to the future.

*
In San Jose there are white figures on the horizon. I am afraid of them; even the Chinese in their black opium dens knew that death is white. And I am taking, or maybe borrowing (we can only hope, and we can't even do that), her from the white figures to this world I'm not always sure I want to be in. It is the only place I have. I feel so helpless in all this wind.

*
All three of us are happy, Kale, Becky, and me. But we know what our lives look like from the outside. And there are times when people tell me I shouldn't be with him, tell me I can't continue to be her friend with all this *LOOMING* over us... You see, they're thinking from the past to the future. There are other ways: the best is to think only in the present, and sometimes it is useful to think from the future "backwards."

We'll always be together, in some way. We'll always outgrow our present pain, the small selves we're living now. We can't disappoint each other. It's only forever.

*
To live in the realm of Buddha nature means to die as a small being, moment after moment. When we lose our balance, we die, but at the same time, we also develop ourselves, we grow. Whatever we see is changing, losing its balance. The reason everything looks beautiful is that it is out of balance, but its background is always in perfect harmony. This is how everything looks in the realm of Buddha nature, losing its balance against a background of perfect balance. Suzuki

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>