From "cannot imagine" to "will not accept"; from "will not surrender" to "can never forget". The layers and levels we uncover in meeting this life challenge our small comforts. If we meet the surface, and draw it aside like a curtain that veils our senses, we reveal richer colors to our sight, intensify the sensation our exploring fingers find, satisfy the brightest/broadest savoring, remind us of a scent that drew us outward and upward, and make the dullest word with renewed connotation charge the mind.

It only seems an exercise of the mind, because it is written in words. The theory of your life is in these coded lines, lines you began to learn when you were very young: trained by those who had been trained, led by those who had been led. Therefore, if you ever say "Now that I know…" you may be living dead. Theory, like language, is alive, is touched by a wave, reached with a sound, and moved from this presumably fixed position to another. Language, like theory, is an exploration, it grows and changes with the time of day or night, the curve of the world or the whorl of a thigh, with loss or with welcoming, with a generation on the rise or a generation gone by.

Therefore, if you say "Now that is done…" you may be dead alive. It is only that your mind has become stuck, or the eyelid fallen over your eye. There is always another layer to the lie, another level to the sky that moves from tangible here to inconceivable there: to where the stars ride, then behind their orbits, below them, inside of them where something of us resides.

The Professor

Possibly the most disappointing lecture I ever attended took place on the East Campus of the University of Minnesota, in a modest lecture hall, circa 1983. The subject was early American literature, the topic Nathaniel Hawthorne, a novel we had been reading. Between its lines were passages of harrowing beauty and fear, a depth of darkness among the roots and trees of a new continent; a language and a context which was familiar and yet uncomfortably inaccessible, the reading of which left my mind muddied — muddied like colonial boots, like sweat and labored harvest, like a storm-clouded new-world sermon. It troubled me a whole week. Or longer, I must admit with a wry smile, as I am thinking about it still, and find in the hurried architecture of my sentences some hesitation of the breath and… slight contortion of the spirit… a quarter-century later.

The professor walked to the board and drew a vertical line near its center, his chalk making a sharp turn and completing the line away to his right. He then slashed the chalk from upper left to lower right, and slashing again, drew another from lower left to upper right, forming an X  between a pair of axes. A puff of chalkdust fell away from his writing: a current of air pulled it outward, then gravity pulled it downward. Where it came in contact with the light, its simple form took on a swirling, complex life that you watched, amazed, then wondered: if you breathed that dust, what would happen to your lungs when you did? Dust on the board, dust in the air. Dust.

Along the X axis, the professor wrote numbers, beginning with one, and rising step by step to enumerate the chapters of Mr. Hawthorne's text. He hesitated, then declined to identify the units of the vertical measure. Then he turned to face the class. "This," he said, gesturing to the graph with his left hand, holding the chalk like an extra finger, "is Hawthorne's work."

Many people call darkness light. We all do, in fact. The wandering text above is my attempt to find a bit of light, though darkness prevails. Your attempt to drink this water, drawn from a rather deep well, shows your desire for light. My professor taught me absolutely nothing about Hawthorne, but a great deal about light and its absence.

The Laboratory

Between there and here, unceasing water runs. And if your Self has this interest – to know Yourself in this incarnation, as completely as It or You may – then every veil is already understood to be a veil, and beneath it some knowledge that is broader, understanding greater, and ability to love that is deeper. No matter that today you did not smile, or that tomorrow you will not live that love (because today you did not practice your smile): there is always a layer beneath what has just been, or what is coming into being, and beneath the layer, more light.

Walk in the woods: you are involved in your walking. The trail is a path of your making and remaking. Every moment you reinvent "Trail", and place yourself upon it. And every moment, after the first thrill of newness, the Trail becomes more and more a trail, this step the same as the last, until at the end of the day, you stop, look around, and admire how the sun has sped without your notice, your feet are tired, some passage made.

What if…

You walk along the trail and suddenly, without premeditation, stop in your tracks. Look: what do you see? In that moment our mind records a litany of images already catalogued and distinguished in your personal history. Look again. A movement, an insect, a trickle of sweat, the quickened breath, a scent of… what? Light through the canopy of leaves; stillness. Look again. A motion of one leaf against the next and the sound they make, the return of woodland noises your passage chased to silence, the desire to kiss someone, water over stones far away, the solid presence of one and then another and another until uncounted trees. Look again.

Surfaces

Once I read a text on loving, on making love, that described practices handed down through the ages. The authors drew on kama-sutric variations, and tantric ways to weave two bodies. I remember other such titles I was ashamed to pick up as a youth: the G-Spot, Your Erogenous Zones, and a multitude of other technical manuals whose goals I discovered were, generally speaking, to teach the mechanics of  physical pleasure and (sometimes) how to use the physical to embrace the heart as well. (There are some quite notable exceptions, such as The Art of Conscious Loving, by Charles and Carolyn Muir).

And how does my swirling thought arrive at this earthy, if not tawdry, destination?

Well, exactly. You want to rest on a thought, on a combination of words. Don't. What if there is a way to offer more pleasure to a lover, or to instruct greater pleasure for yourself? Excellent, and look again. What if a simple physical practice could be a pathway into the woods, a way to surrender more deeply to one another? Beautiful, and look again. What if your connecting and touching is larger than your two bodies, or your two desires, or your joined love? Look again. What if the deepest part of your partner, there where you are subtly, gently reaching, is the Spark of Life – if you are opening and offering your Spark to be lit and relit by that Spark? Look past the graph, and past the words, and past the light through the leaves, and past the emotional waves and misspoken words, and past the faces, past the five senses, look again, and again, and again, and again and again and again and again.

Until you feel your eyes open.

A bit wider.