Here to Be Here
A winter storm has covered our earth with snow, like the sands of a beach, but deposited by waves of wind; now the air temperature rises and sleet makes a slick glaze overall; now the sun is left behind as we spin toward the east, – whatever East is: we spin in the direction of our spin – and the temperature drops again, and the whole of her body is draped in a white sheet. I have been inside most of the day. I have worked, because wires and wireless have taken my words, in streams of zeros and ones, from the tips of my fingers to the video screens in Boston and elsewhere. I can be a hermit without isolation.
But as the movement in life diminishes, a certain melancholy fills the spaces between doing one thing and doing another. Movement blurs the truth of things, until you see only movement, as if watching a meadow from a speeding car, and that meadow becomes a single wash of green, where individual flowers and individual barren places are indiscernible, and movement itself seems to take on a body of its own, vibration high enough to hear, and low enough to feel.
That’s not why we’re here, though. Even the melancholy is better purpose than the blur.
Outside the window the dried remains of autumns flowers stick up from the glazed and drifted snow. They are dead now, the seed has been given, and the body is a shell. Some time, perhaps not long from now, each of us will have given our seed, and each of us will have departed through the same doorway; but that is not now. Now the flower is blooming. There is nothing to do but bloom. And there is nothing to do but continue to reach upward – you needn’t even make an effort: it is your essence to reach upward – and open your arms and invite everything the world is into your petals.
The lotus pictured here is remarkable: look at its development, from seed to stem, from stem to bud, from bud to flower, from flower to fruit, from fruit to seed, that is my path too, and everything is in everything else, the snow is my path, too, and the dried branch that accomplished so much, accomplished living a life, that is my path, too. While the mind keeps striving and the body driving to connect and release, the truth that is blurred in movement can be caught in the blink of an eye, like the shutter of a camera, we are here to be here, nothing more. We are here to be here.