Tag Archives: anicca

beyond words

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625921POSTCARD #211: Bangkok: The next day, after arriving here from the airport by way of taxi driven at startling speeds [link to as the crow flies], the recovery from that and… wake up in the morning. Time to go see the neurologist/ neurosurgeon to have the dreaded needle in the head, for the second time (by some means of bone conduction, you can hear the needle point scraping over the surface of the skull: kritch-krrrritchchch). The needle poised at X marks the spot inscribed in biro pen on my scalp (he tells me), the exact position on the occipital nerve (the nerve tree which has been causing the permanent headache since September last year). Now you will feel a little pressure here, doc says quietly, close to my ear, as if it were a secret. Needle goes in, pain-pain-pain, doc voids the syringe, withdraws needle. Thank you very much (I just want to get out of there), go home, sleep, wake up and the headache is gone!

The relief is beyond words

The headache is gone… hard to believe – really. Wow! it worked. How long will it last? (remembering “Awakenings’ by Oliver Sachs, made into a movie starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams). Well… even if it’s for a short time, I can enjoy life in this headache-free interval; just so good to be able to get around and do things without the billiard ball crashing around inside the skull – only these curious sparkling sharp feelings at the sides of the head. In the centre there’s a kind of blank space where the headache used to be, a soft comfy pillow-like feeling… the first headache-free time for eight months.

So the first thing I discover is there’s all this physical energy… I can go around and do things without the great burden of headache. Rushing around the house in a great burst of enthusiasm, I decide to wash some clothes and like most houses in Asia, the washing machine is outside the house, under an open sheltered area with stretched lines for hanging things out to dry in the fresh air. So I put clothes in the machine, select ‘Quick Wash’ and start the cycle.

Go back inside, forget completely they’re there and start cooking a soup with all kinds of vegetables. It’s a bit late in the day when I remember and go out there again, (it’s the rainy season in Thailand) and the rain started to come on, then very quickly it’s a colossal downpour and I have to hang clothes any-which-way in dry corners; on hooks and the back of chairs in places sheltered from this incredible rain like what I suddenly remember as, both bath taps full on.

Back indoors from time to time to stir the soup, plip plop plip like a frog, barefoot on kitchen floor now wet with in-and-out traffic and scraps of vegetable peelings. The great smell of soup starts to come to me as I’m looking for more places to hang wet clothes. Deafening sound of rain on perspex rooftops, and gusts of rainy wind in through the open door nearly blows out the gas flame. But it doesn’t, and everything seems to be just right as-it-is in this wet, green place.
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Photo: Bangkok Post [link] worshippers at the Erawan shrine despite the rain

as the crow flies

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IMG_2982POSTCARD #210: Delhi/Bangkok flight: I arrived at the place and couldn’t remember how exactly I came to be there except for the journey returning to me in flashes; scanned by X-ray machines, identified, processed, held in aircraft cabin pressure for 4 hours… then look out the window and see small green rice fields with water everywhere; 1800 miles southeast on the Asia map as the crow flies.

Placed on the ground and I have to get my things quickly, put together the parts of who I think I am in this new context of a day I missed the beginning of, and things out there are just happening anyway. Extraordinary, even so – catching up on the rebound, the momentum of the journey, the sense of something recharged, action endowed with purpose because I’ve arrived in what remains of a day that belongs to other people, those who have been here since early morning… Sorry I’m late, dropped out of the sky unnoticed – the Fall of Icarus in a painting by Pieter Bruegel.

Look at the camera please, click, passport page, thump, you have entered the Kingdom… exotic creatures made of gold. The world seen in flashes from an airport taxi in the fast lane, everything designed to get us there with the urgency of speed. It feels like the whole outside is entering the inside in large jigsaw pieces of landscape partly remembered, connected familiarity, but no time to think where, when, or who with. Glimpses of other people’s traffic congestion at the paytolls, shadowy drivers and their tinted glass and steel glint, chromium shine of new cars in pastel shades sliding slowly along in the golden light of their early-evening lives.

In here everything is locked down tight, attention captivated by the directionality of the journey I see through the front windscreen how we’re hurtling into a wormhole in space/time, plunging towards a vanishing point that never arrives. The outer world becomes neutral, non-intrusive random thought mechanisms that function at the edge of a dream pull me into the gentle whirr and flicker of thinking-about-things, and it seems like what’s happening here just could not be any more ordinary.

I find relief in that… can unwind in the Thai sense of normality, thammada, ธรรมดา, mind still buzzing as it is with the energy, the immediacy of the experience. Just fall into focus on the neutrality of no-thinking, looking for the space that’s between things. Deep in-breath and extended outbreath; the long and forever road extending deep into the horizon with great dome of sky above. Everything looks like a picture of what it is, a composition, a story told by a storyteller long since disappeared and I can’t remember how I came to be here, only parts of the journey now coming back to me in flashes, shining in my darkness at the edge of sleep in a different time zone.

“You are not in the universe, you are the universe, an intrinsic part of it. Ultimately, you are not a person, but a focal point where the universe is becoming conscious of itself.” [Eckhart Tolle]

Photo: Departures walkway at Delhi.  New… pls chk out the latest art page post

passing through 2

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IMG_3448POSTCARD #209: Delhi, North India: There are times when the whole thing just gets stuck in the traffic jam of Mind – objects in movement screech to a halt, metallic creaks stretch out the momentum, jerk back and come to a standstill. Eyes blink in the silence and falling specks of dust, the world is seen as if it were a screenshot of the present moment. I focus on the long deep in-breath, the forever long out-breath… it is as it is in this instant, a fusion of everything seen, heard, touched, the taste, the smell, and all this held in thought, in words unspoken.

I’m falling into this familiarity again, having been far away from here, the first time in four years. Returning now and I’ve forgotten how to write, how to shape it so it fits, how to allow it to take form of its own accord. Surprised to discover that when I engage with it, that action seems to trigger remembering, opening up a gallery of recollections unfolding and integrated pieces of imagery like massive Lego constructs of long-term memory files (patisandha, if we can call it rebirth), fit together as in a 3D jigsaw, and the whole thing gathers speed like a long straight highway cuts through the landscape, large chunks of it seen rising up and falling away on either side, then the engine noise, a rolling and a tumbling along.

Many thanks for the Voice from blogging friends that reminds me of the connection that’s out there. I’ve got more of an understanding of Indie Publishing now than I had a few months ago, the first section of the book is completed as preliminary draft and the wind in its hair. I know at some point it’ll shout out that it’s complete. Nothing else to say at this time, everything that relates to this swept away in the doppler effect, sounds flatten off and it’s gone….

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Photo: autorickshaws in Mumbai

the desire to believe in

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IMG_2511POSTCARD #207: CHIANG MAI: Before my Thai niece M runs out the door to spend the day with her friends, she comes over to where I’m sitting and says: Toong Ting? I am going now. Bye bye! And she’s gone. I sit there for a while being Toong Ting, her pet name for me, part of her baby talk that remains because it’s thought to be cute when applied in a grandfatherly way. I feel like I don’t deserve it… the Judeo-Christian sense of guilt that doesn’t fit in this Buddhist country (I need to remind myself always). M is courteous and respectful as she’s been taught, a learned thing which reinforces the natural world-view children have. But I wonder if I’m worthy of it – am I simply taking advantage of people’s natural desire to believe in, to trust?

More than thirty years of living with other people’s preferences, adopting them as my own… how it is for the migrant in his/her host country. North Americans must have a deep familiarity with this. There’s a slight doubt that enters sometimes, it’s as if everything that’s done or said is a form of compliance, has the quality of procurement – how can I be as committed to being here as everyone else is when I know I could get on a plane any time and disappear? Moving from one ‘safe house’ to the next, the leave-taking between is sudden and children may forget me completely, or think about it for a lifetime and never understand why I went away. It’s something unknown, unthought in the Thai world. They’re so kind here. I feel I don’t deserve it.

The silence of the room comes as a surprise, birdsong in the trees opposite the window, and I wake up from this prolonged moment in search of the memory of who I am. The same as it always is; I’ve arrived here by the same route I’m accustomed to when reviewing the image of who I want to be and who I think I am. It happens in a tiny fraction of a second, so fast it feels like the process of trying to figure it out is in slow motion.

Objects scattered on the desk in the position they were in, unmoved, a pen, papers – a cup with a curious handle that appears to stick out further and wider than it should, waiting for my fingers to come and hold it… I’d be that person I think I am if I were to I reach for the cup. Alice in Wonderland, Drink Me says the label on the bottle… but I don’t and it doesn’t happen. Everything on the desk and the sofa and the floor remains as a quiet presence of M, these are her unclaimed, unidentified objects that come alive when she’s here. Maybe it’s easier for me than for the native inhabitant to choose to stay with the emptiness and silence of inanimate things, the motionless space where everything is situated, aware of context and content, and seeing that which normally passes unseen.

It’s a perception, and only seems real by comparison with other things that are thought to be not real… falling into the delusion it’s not delusion, or knowing it’s reality – we do it knowingly, we go with the illusion. For a moment it’s seen and this is how we escape from it. Sometimes it’s a familiarity displaced and we’re tricked into staying there believing it’s really real but we’ve only convinced ourselves that it is, and it can take years, a lifetime. A pattern found in the itinerary of former lives, all these journeys connected end-to-end, divided and subdivided into periods of looking out the twin windows of the upper front face of the skull as if it were a moving vehicle, and looking out and thinking: ‘are we there yet?’ Then back to the conundrum of being busy with thought, and never arriving.

Later in the day a message on my phone goes ding! A picture of somebody’s lunch. It’s from M they’re all in a restaurant I’ve been in before and I can imagine how that is right now…

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Photo: a carefully created pavement repair in Chiang Mai.

knowing knows knowing

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IMG_2910bPOSTCARD #204: DELHI: … like suddenly waking from a dream, an unfinished story and something just happened – so fast that everything is out of sync, skips a beat. It’s because I’ve been unknowingly holding this pain in my head that’s now breaking through and the holding is not as important as the getting away from it… this is not happening to me! With that recognition, suddenly there’s no ‘me’ to whom this pain is happening just the velocity of it, like a wind storm and I’m lying flat in the grass as it passes over.

Some time after that, having taken my meds and the pain is now walled off in a corner of the head, I’m sitting in a straight-backed chair, just to see how that feels. Breath enters the body like a wind gusting in, withdraws, comes back, blows through everything then it’s not there again. Focus shifts to a great emptiness opening up – opening and opening… I might easily believe this will never end, but moving along with it to see what the next thing is. The purpose of my life is the on-going experiential response to the impact of sensory contact – what else could it be about? Skin, muscle, flesh, and these mysterious organs held by ligaments bonded into a skeletal structure. It’s as if there’s an electrical charge in there, sparks flying out. I am the context for the outer content. The whole investigation is one that is open to following where the knowing of it leads, see where it’s going, how it reacts. Conscious awareness of how the mind is able to concentrate and to what extent – passageways of insight open in an instant and a great flood of things to think about pours in.

Thought sequences and memories become apparent when they reach the point of “being”… before that they’re in the uncreated state – arbitrary, disassociated. Things don’t exist at all, until I observe them. There’s the Observer Effect in quantum physics, the experiment showing that when one is observing the movement of electrons it changes their behavior. In Buddhist thought, the ‘observer’ is not the ‘self’ but the self-construct arising from responses to sensory input via the Five Khandas. Received data is formed according to the mechanisms of the human sensory process – including cognition, which is a sense like all the others, and the great dome of sky above. Mindfulness is a returning to that place where I see how things change through my engagement with them…

‘All we know of a thought is the experience of thinking, all we know of a sensation is the experience of sensing, all we know of a sight is the experiencing of seeing, all we know of a sound is the experience of hearing…. And all that is known of thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting and smelling is the knowing of them. And what is it that knows this knowing? Only something that itself has the capacity to know could know anything. So it is knowing that knows knowing.’ [Rupert Spira]

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Note: excerpts from an earlier post titled: ‘it’. Photo: Buddha rupa on the my working desk and the view of the garden

time-lapse

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IMG_1005 (1)POSTCARD #202: CHIANG MAI/DELHI: It looks like this tuk-tuk is moving but it’s not. Shadows of overhead cables create the effect. It feels like this present moment is just one screenshot taken in the making of a video about my whole life… well, I suppose it is, but if I hold everything on the pause button and examine my surroundings in detail, I find they’re not held in the moment I’m in. I’m distracted by two large birds zooming past my window, one bird chasing the other. If the whole thing was tracked by time-lapse photography, the trees could be seen growing up, extending their branches, leaves, closer to my window and blocking the daylight. The flight of birds would be like bees buzzing around in a cloud, and my movements in the apartment, a flash of shadowy comings and goings. Then stillness for the times I’m not there, only the sunrise and sunset light illuminating and darkening the empty living space.

The mind was in this time-lapse mode and I allowed a whole day to pack and tidy up the apartment. More than enough time, it was a night flight, so I’m moving in slo-mo action and at the same time watching a video posted by a Buddhist blogger friend. The packing was uncomplicated because it was all clothes for laundry – my washing machine stopped working the other day and the repairman will come after I leave (somebody will take care of it). So packing your bag is easy if it’s all stuff headed for the washing machine. Mostly it’s just getting it all in, squeezed into all the corners and close the bag with one all-round zip-zip-zip. Carrying 20 kilos of laundry across international borders and through X-ray machines and the officer stops me at the Nothing To Declare exit: ‘may I see inside your bag sir?’ “Carrying clothes for laundry into the country, are we then sir? [Aha, a likely story…]”

That didn’t take place, just a story inside my head with different versions of the same thing played out again and again. I got to the house, said hello to everyone and excuse me for a moment, into the laundry area and put the entire contents of my bag into the washing machine in one swift unpacking movement. Add detergent, select the program button, and close the door click! That’s it, done. The whole point of the journey was to get to the washing machine, you could say.

But, before that happened, M and her mom turned up to say good-bye. They brought with them a friend who is a masseuse, so I’m saying how about this pain in my head and neck? (PHN) and in seconds she had me face down on the bed, embarked on a full body massage, she’s on my back, twanging ligaments and tendons like guitar strings. I was in a daze, just enough time to shower and put on the only remaining set of wearable clothes, into a tuk-tuk for the airport – and there was no pain as such, just an easing because the ligaments and tendons’ twanging had stopped.

All the way through this, there were pictures in my mind of getting to the destination but having to correct these images because what I see is the old house, not the present house. I’ve spent more time since last November away from the place than living there. So I have to consciously delete these old remembered places and try to bring the present house to mind. Strange how you have to think things back to how they are right now rather than how they used to be. But the actual destination doesn’t show on the mind’s screen, hasn’t been updated yet… and sleep sweeps me away. Hardly noticed the arrival at 2.30 am, time brought forward by one hour and a half. I’m shoveled into the car by circumstances prevailing, and everything pushing me along in that direction. I get to the house, into the laundry area and put the entire contents of my bag into the washing machine in one swift unpacking movement. Add detergent, select the program button, and close the door click! And there’s this déjà vu thing about it.

“The timeless in you is aware of life’s timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today’s memory and tomorrow is today’s dream.” [Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet]

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somewhere else

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IMG_2056POSTCARD #195: NEW DELHI: These easy days of gentle sunshine on the roof terrace coming to an end. The long shadow of departure is approaching again and I’m caught in the momentum of its passing, swept through airport halls, the layers and passageways of the travel network. Checked-in, identified, one self-contained unit flowing along in the great river of humanity 24/7 passing through these air-conditioned corridors within corridors connected end-to-end, telescoped into smaller passageways, and down into the low ceilinged capacity, enclosed space of an aircraft seat made to measure, reduced, restrained, tightness in the knees squeezed in. There’s a small video screen about 18 inches from my face, showing hundreds of movies. Fold-down tables upon which, small trays of food are placed, fit exactly, and inside they’re divided into even smaller dishes. Small cup, small spoon, absolutely tiny packets of salt and pepper and a toothpick…

In no time at all, the food trays are cleared away, watch videos for four hours flying time, sleep for a while, go to the bathroom, then we’re there – just beginning to feel comfortable and it’s time to go. Passengers squeeze and squidge along the aisles like one body of thick fluid bristling with hand-held luggage and jamming up the doorway. The space we’re in opens out and extends, becomes a passageway then a larger space, all of us holding a destination in mind. Eyes hardly ever meet, preoccupied with mobile devices or searching for signs. Turn left, then right, stand in the immigration queue, passport stamped thump. Out of there and I’m in a different country.

I’m going to Carolina in my mind, or is it just a continuation of the last journey? Home is an expanded concept, ‘many mansions’, memory of former lives. It has the feeling of an in-transit time; where we were after we left and before we arrived. It’s the ‘in-between’ time (when is it never the in-between’ time?) on the way to or coming back from somewhere else. There’s a Nagarjuna quote: ‘All things are impermanent, which means there is neither permanence nor impermanence…’ Change sometimes takes a very long time to happen. Usually though there’s enough time to rest, open up everything and lay out my things, then pack with fresh clothing and something new arrives; I’m swept away in the velocity of thought. These easy days of gentle sunshine on the roof terrace coming to an end…

“Just as it is known
That an image of one’s face is seen
Depending on a mirror
But does not really exist as a face,
So the conception of “I” exists
Dependent on mind and body,
But like the image of a face
The “I” does not at all exist as its own reality.”
[Nāgārjuna, c. 150 – 250 CE]

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found objects

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Library - 1POSTCARD #194: NEW DELHI: Even though everything we had in the old house was numbered, labelled and the whole thing carefully folded in on itself and squeezed into a removals truck with a set of instructions on how to reassemble, when we got to the new house it came out backwards, and the assembly instructions must have gotten lost as it was going in. Thus everything had to be emptied out on the floor in the search for the instructions, and that’s how it began to look like a vast three dimensional jigsaw of an instant house-kit, abstracted. So that when the assembly instructions were found, we weren’t interested in them anymore because we’d already found the proper screwdivers and L-shaped keys that fit into these holes in furniture assembly and started to put bits of it together by eye and what looked right. More things were discovered, ‘objets trouvés’, a collage, arising from found objects carrying that strange familiarity… traces of a former life.

And that was when I remembered something from long ago and far away; I used to be an easel painter, had exhibitions, sold paintings, thought about being a rising star in the World of Art. Then something happened – I don’t know what, an insight into how things arise and pass away. Everything just turned to dust, vapourized, reduced, distilled into the elements, thoughts created by Mind and the words required to describe it started to run out. Anything still standing after the event was taken to pieces, carefully numbered, labelled and the whole thing folded in on itself, then squeezed into a large box that I’ve carried around with me ever since and never opened… until now.

I cut through the old nylon ropes and slit around the edges of the box, sealed with parcel tape and old labels saying FRAGILE and sticky stuff from years of airline stickers for check-in luggage. The lid opens with a creak and a great volume of pandora’s creative playfulness is released in a soundless explosion. Well, that’s done it… no going back now. Brushes, pallete knives, tubes of acrylic paint, acrylic medium, glue gone hard, unusable adhesive tape, bits of measuring devices. and pieces of artwork. Boxes of charcoal, ink and yellowed pencil drawings for a painting I remember I never started – wouldn’t it be fun to go back, after all these years, and pick up where I left off?

IMG_2665bI don’t know how many years have gone by, lost in the dream. Woke up one day, look in the mirror, hair gone white; the Rip Van Winkle effect – all of the elders are dead now and I’m grateful for everything I have that belonged to them (strangely addressed in the past tense). I’ve forgotten the ‘me’ that used to hold these brushes, squeezing these tubes of vermillion, cadmium yellow, it’s been such a long time, so many journeys extended out over thousands of air-miles, hours and days maybe weeks of looking out the windows of an airplane somewhere in the clouds and the world coming in through these eyes but seeing it like it’s not ‘me’ personally that it’s happening to, more like it’s an extension of what’s out there.

A sense of the air and spaces inside things I never even thought of until now. It’s possible that this is the right time to return to it. Less words more imagery, it’ll change the direction of the blog. Let’s see, I’m going to take a look into that pandora’s box, maybe find out what it was that caused things to shift as they did and what can be retrieved from the wreckage… got to go now. Sayonara bloggers, more later….

UPDATE: CHECK OUT THE NEW PAGE OF MY ARTWORKS, GO TO HOME AND LOOK FOR THE PAGE TITLED ‘ART’ UNDER THE HEADER IMAGE

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springtime, new delhi

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IMG_0277POSTCARD #193: NEW DELHI: Watering the plants upstairs on the roof terrace and there’s this small one looking so simple and symmetrical, extraordinary. I take a photo of it and zoom into the wonderful experience of a life form in a different kind of temporality. It’s springtime here and the analogy of everything waking up applies, except that there’s no snow in winter, really no winter, and there never was any time before this, or anywhere in the future when things were or will be asleep. Everything is awake, the sense of an eye like a camera aperture so wide open the edges of it creak with the strain of it trying to open wider. It’s an endless cycle of birth/rebirth, the seed contained in the fruit that falls from the tree and from there another tree grows which creates another seed. No beginning/no end, all forms intertwined with each other to the extent that they are inseparable, bound together in time. The inclination is to think what was it like before this, when things were separate and the mind tries to pull it all apart. What was it like before all this, before the Big Bang?

Another kind of reality. What happened before we came here? We were in another house in New Delhi. It had a roof terrace and seeds were planted in flowerpots there, we carried the pots and everything from there to here and these seeds are now sprouting on this roof terrace. It makes no difference to the plants if they’re moved, so long as they have the same conditions, the cycle continues; seed/ plant/ flower spinning in their own arising and falling away, an enfolding and unfolding sequence of patterns in movement, and I come along, view it from this entry-point in time, called ‘here’.

There’s the urge to create an object that could fill this perceived space, this seemingly incomplete world: the sense of a vacant place we need to fill with something held in high esteem, and that will make it whole… what is it? Christians call it God, Hindus call it Brahman and Buddhists have no name for it, because everything is integrated, nothing exists outside of this – really nothing, not even the word ‘nothing’. Subject/object together in a oneness of contemplation, in conscious experience and the path taken leads us into a realm so fragile and subtle you can never be absolutely sure you’re not just seeing it the way you want it to be, and not really how it actually is. Better not to call it anything, acknowledge its presence, awareness is all-inclusive, mindfulness, take care, and see how that goes.

The sensitivity of the mind, not held by the limitations of the body, always looking for more than what there is, searching beyond the present instance; using one thing as a springboard to get to the next, everything is driven on and on, and present time is not here at all. There’s the sense of a game, an energy, a curiosity – a desire to get involved with ‘it’. The object is the desired state. It belongs to ‘me,’ the act of possessing it requires that there has to be an ‘I’ to whom it belongs. Everything I have, everything I want, all of this is ‘mine.’ Even my enemy is mine. Thus indirectly creating an identity that is always somehow incomplete unfulfilled, searching for the truth in this and unable to see that it’s the searching that maintains the state of being lost. It’s the seeking that causes it to be formed, reformed and transformed: the world is seen, sounds are heard, food is tasted, words are spoken, things are done, but there is no do-er.

“Imagine if all things that are perishable grew still – for if we listen they are saying, “We did not make ourselves; he made us who abides forever” – imagine, then, that they should say this and fall silent, listening to the very voice of him who made them and not to that of his creation; so that we should hear not his word through the tongues of men, nor the voice of angels, nor the clouds’ thunder, nor any symbol, but the very Self which in these things we love, and go beyond ourselves to attain a flash of that eternal wisdom which abides above all things: And imagine if that moment were to go on and on, leaving behind all other sights and sounds but this one vision which ravishes and absorbs and fixes the beholder in joy; so that the rest of eternal life were like that moment of illumination which leaves us breathless: Would this not be what is bidden in the scripture, Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord?” [Saint Augustine]

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whispering winds

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dreamstimefree_251662POSTCARD #192: VASANT VIHAR, NEW DELHI: An extraordinary battle with uncompromising traffic to get here on time for Head-ache’s appointment with the doctor at 5pm. Shrill penetrating, sharp horns blast, push, persist, insist on the direction we take, and suddenly we slice through the evening rush-hour, arriving at the place too early by half an hour. It’s like that sometimes; tumble into a parking slot by the park, uneven ground and the car tilts over and slightly back. Open all the doors to allow the fresh air and warm wind to blow through.

Things are suddenly rustled in the quietness here in the tilted back seat and I get loose papers weighted down or they will fly out the doors. It’s like we’ve always been here and any memory of the journey to get to this place has been somehow displaced by the wind passing through the interior of the car; a quick investigation here-and-there, then out among the trees, rustling the leaves in a great sigh of high frequency leaf-whisper sounds, masses of individual notes played in cluster upon cluster, swishing and swooshing foliage branches – a sound that seems to crash like waves on the shores of a sandy beach.

The first wind of its kind for many months comes at the end of the cold season. Its warmth enters everywhere, into every thing; blows out gusts, sucks in voids and spins everything around. Swooping down, so inquisitive, and filling up all the places and spaces, then out and up in the sky where only birds engage with it. A wind that’s present everywhere at the same time, a wind that enters into and out of all things as if it were something autonomous, an invisible entity. Where’d it go… have you seen the wind? How can that be possible, isn’t it formlessness? We know it’s here only by the sound of it, in the leaves and seeing the swaying of branches in a succession of movements, an expression of the air displacement itself; a manifestation of the wind – I can become the wind, the space where it goes.

Now this – now that, long tree branches drifting and swaying patterns of light and shade over my clothing, look up at the sun and get pleasantly blinded by it in a twinkle. This wind blows through the mind, my awareness of it rises as it rises; I become more alert when it’s very loud, feel at ease when it’s still and quiet. It becomes the thought flow, gently restless in the swooping shadows plunging deep into foliage pattern. The oneness of it all includes everything seen and unseen. Better not be late for our doctor’s-appointment, we spill out of the car, hair-whiplash on forehead, gather myself up with my companion Head-ache and together we stumble across the road to see the neurologist witch-doctor, amazed by this persistent wind. Sunlight and shadow-shapes of foliage sweeping over the roadway and path, all around…

But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
[Dogen]
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Related post: Memories and the wind
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