It's Monday, after a holiday, hard to get started, to settle down and work. This morning when I left the sun was rising just above the horizon, dark red, condensed, thick as tomato soup, with swirls of dark blue cloud racing across the face of it. As I watched it rise, mostly in the rearview mirror, it lightened, fading and fading to a pale sherbet orange, then an even paler yellow, and all the color in the sun leached out into the clouds, dyeing them so many shades of red, orange, and pink, all those color words that are so much fun to say . . . cerise, magenta, puce, tangerine, carnation, amarillo, said in Spanish, ama-ree-oh, yellow, to me a nice golden yellow with a whiff of orange. Then I noticed the moon was still up, the waning moon still nearly full, a pale ghost against that riot of color, then also fading, white vanishing into blue. I don't get to see both the sun and the moon in the same sky often, too many trees, but driving out by the port, so much flat space where they have cut down all the trees, you can see a long way. And the timing has to be right, early enough in the morning to see both before one is lost to the brightness of the other.
Over the weekend when looking up something else, I found again one of my favorite poems and thought I would send it to start the week. I made me laugh out loud the first time I read it and I still smile each time. One of the most . . . zen . . . poems I have ever read. Many people think zen a very serious subject, but if you read zen poems or koans, so much humor in them all, such acknowledgment of how human we all are.
The Three Goals
The first goal is to see the thing itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism, please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing
as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and second goals,
to see the universal and the particular,
simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.
David Budbill
Okay, so sometimes I have met the first goal, though often a little symbolism creeps in no matter how hard I try to avoid it. The second goal I have come to in a flash, once, standing on a street corner, in San Diego, waiting to cross. I don't know why there, but I felt almost physically part of every other thing in the universe, for just a moment I could feel motion through space, atoms of my being connected, vibrating, joined with every other atom. It could have been what I was reading at the time, a lot of books about physics, and philosophy, and religion. Still, a very powerful and heady experience, not repeated again for years, and never in quite the same gut-wrenching way. Now the third goal, I will send you a note when I get that one. <smile> I think it would be sort of like that vase puzzle, where it's black and white and you see either the faces facing each other, or the vase. Sometimes, I can almost see both at once but as soon as I think that happens, they switch. It's almost like your brain has to choose, it must hate ambiguity. Wonder how many decisions we make simply because the brain wants to choose? In physics it's called the superposition of states, and Schrödinger's cat is the example. Once you open the box, a choice is made, by that opening and the observation of the cat. Kind of scary when you think that the whole universe is run on that principle <chuckle>, particle or wave, or both at once until something collapses the state.
So, if you get that third goal, let me know! I want to know how you did it and can you do it again!
The world is a place of constant astonishments, and that's what I notice, that I am constantly being amazed at what is here and what the world offers us, like the sun and the moon, at the same time!
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