You lean out and touch the hard leather. There is a metallic button embedded in the surface, and you finger it slowly and deliberately, startled at the change in texture. You gaze into the dark hue and intuit it is like the sky. The moment of insight is without conception, because you don’t yet have a word for BLUE.

Time does us violence... Were I condemned to death, I should not be executed if, in the interval, time stood still... Time's violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.
~Simone Weil

Were time to stand still, I would not have to endure the shock of separation, the unraveling of bonds.

The blossoms are coming in too early. It is still the dead of winter, and the tiny buds are foolhardy to take this risk. One cold snap, and the delicate white petals fall to the frostbitten grass.

And then I bump up against a hard, black surface, as impenetrable as a cut diamond. It glows dimly with a hundred thousand tiny points of light.

She is back in desert country. It is dry and the hills are copper-colored. She missed it, and now she starts walking through the scant brush. She feels a distinct and piercing pain in the toe and fears that she might have been bitten. Lifting her foot gently off the ground, she confirms it: a snake has buried its fangs in the flesh.

Dwelling in the great abode, an enormous cathedral of the purest ocean-blue water held in place by a dazzling matrix of arches made of diamond slabs. Only a hum like the inside of a seashell, only one opening in the far end, a gap in the whirring folds of blue.

She is back in her childhood home – a tiny, first-floor apartment in the trash-strewn projects. It is bare, with a mattress leaning against the wall of the living room. She walks over to the window. It looks out onto a small grassy patch where a large peacock is strolling and picking at the ground. Its tail is magnificently long but folded. She tries to call her mother over to the window and show her the peacock, but her mother does not believe her.

She joined the exodus. First the train, then a bus, commandeered with breathless speed by a driver crazed with fear. Midway through the journey, they stopped at a makeshift encampment and she realized she had forgotten to take the thick sleeping bag she had laid out right before the journey. She walked about restless and cold, trying to find a comfortable spot in the abandoned shell of a semi full of spilled broccoli heads. In the morning she set back for the sleeping bag but stopped in a clearing of tall pines, arrested by the tranquil beauty. A man who lived there said:

“Why meet the end of the world there when you can do it here?”

At once she decided to stay in the valley of the pines and meet the inevitable, unstoppable current of fate without fear. She kissed the young man, shyly at first, then ever more eagerly as the erotic plea of life tightened around their disintegrating bodies.

.......

The act of being alive inflicts violence on other forms of life. This is an inescapable fact. Thus existential guilt is a natural outcome being a self-aware creature (i.e., I kill/consume in order to perpetuate my creatureliness).

Guilt and its resultant suffering and horror at one’s actions are therefore not neurotic!

Why should this guilt not extend to violent thoughts about others?

Simone Weil:

Necessity-an image by which the mind can conceive of the indifference, the impartiality of God.

Necessity is God's veil.

The absence of God is the most marvellous testimony of perfect love, and that is why pure necessity, necessity which is manifestly different from good, is so beautiful.

***

Example: a contemplation of the flower. Its unfolding is inexorable and absolutely necessary. It will grow in the queen's garden and in the trash-strewn lot by the freeway overpass. It does not prefer or take notice whether it is admired or scorned.

In antiquity there were sacred orders of humans who had the awe-full, wonderful, terrifying privilege of keeping the cosmos in order. To think that there were people who knew, absolutely and finally in their very hearts, that their ceremonies kept the sun rising each morning. How differently might we feel about our own lives if we held such a tremendous responsibility? But no more. No one now believes such things, save lunatics. I once read about a man who spent two years motionless in bed in a psychiatric ward. After two “catatonic” years he suddenly rose, walked over to the table where the staff were eating their customary lunch, and began a casual conversation while he helped himself to some food – all in a manner as if nothing had happened. Astonished, one of the therapists asked him what brought on the sudden recovery. The man answered that he had been attempting to count to a million – the salvation of the world depended on this – but had been interrupted in the early days of his stay at the hospital by the staff’s initially forceful interventions. He would then lose his count and have to start over.

Attachment

Each spring the calla lilies outside my kitchen window unfold their white spiral cones – of their own sweet desire, since I have not planted them, nor enriched their soil for over six years. Each spring I watch their thick radiance persist through the early summer. Awed and astonished, I feel an ever more insistent attachment to this fearless erotic display of power. Then, inexorably, the heartbreak sets in as the petals wilt slowly but relentlessly away, until I stand, abandoned and grief-stricken, in the naked absence.

Awe, exiled and fiercely vengeful, is joining other banished spirits, gathering force and fury and ravaging our world. All are perishing by the hand of awe banished to the underworld.

The phenomena of life may be likened unto a dream, a phantasm, a bubble, a shadow, the glistening dew, or lighting flash; and thus they ought to be contemplated.

~The Immutable Sutra

The problem was not the grief – the great misdeed was to try to flee from the grief. Only a sacrifice can mend the heart. So here it is, fierce lord. Strip me to my skeleton. Take my bones and grind them to a fine powder. Let nothing remain save the heartbroken love which I hardly noticed anyway when I lived here, in my rusty armor. Take it to the mountain. Let it quicken the heart which died of cold, a heart worthier than mine.

He whom we must love is absent

God can only be present in creation under the form of absence.

Nothing which exists is absolutely worthy of love.
We must therefore love that which does not exist.

~Simone Weil

***

Descent

Bardo wrathful deity

For more wrathful deities, visit dharma media. Click on images for a stunning experience.

Bardo realm

In memory of JK, 1971-2006

And the gates of the bardo of dreaming opened, and it was no longer cold.

Come, said the old man by the fire. He led him into a luminous cave in the side of this forsaken mountain.

Rest from your journey.

So sweet to let the leaden eyelids fall, but he cannot rest until the girls are safe. The girls. And Kati. He loves. A sweet love, longing and violent at once, love that tears its flesh on the wild shrub and bush. If only his legs would move from this quicksand; if only this body would obey…

Sleep, and the warmth of the bonfire spread open his heart.

He loves. He must not abandon the girls. And Kati. Stranded on top of this desolate mountain, and he, inside of it.

Dream.

He dreams. He dreams his love, furious and passionate and unvanquished – a fierce angel taking wing, bounding over the river, the mountains, over time.

Grasping at happiness - like trying to lick honey from a razor's edge.
~ Nyoshul Khenpo

In the zone

A second-floor apartment in Pripyat is sprouting trees. They have spread their baby roots in the cracks of the splintered wood. Trees nesting in the corpses of trees. Life longing in the crumbling rooms, wandering in through the pane-less windows on the wind. If this is a forsaken ruin encircled with barbed wire and marked “zone of exclusion,” the young oak upstairs has ignored the warnings. What it knows is that here is shelter, here is silence – all it needs to grow its shy arms and reach for the sunlight.

Restless

Eros, born out of the Cosmic Egg laid by Night, was given Soul by the blowing about of the life-giving winds. Restless and melancholy is the soul; restless and melancholy for communion consecrated to Eternity.

Shadow realm

The secret

For the dead are thirsty and in urgent need of water... And they drink a certain measure of the water of Forgetfulness, whereupon they are reborn without Memory.


The secret, then, is to live each moment in remembrance of Death. I raise this cup to my lips and taste the fragrant, bittersweet brew with consummate mindfulness.

The poetics of affliction

Simone Weil:

We should make every effort we can to avoid affliction, so that the affliction which we meet may be perfectly pure and perfectly bitter.

What he said, 11/30/06

“She was walking down the middle of the boulevard dressed twentieth century smart; she was walking up and down the median of the boulevard lined with black granite monoliths, then suddenly yanked off her lush black wig in a sweep of her hand. Her raccoon hair fell out in a radiant splash of dapples and she spoke (and I saw, I SAW the words streaming forth from her mouth and filling space with the vermilion of the Golden Gate): Did you know that I could sing? Did you know that? And she laughed a healthy, happy laugh, and I awoke cradled in the folds of the valley which was filled with the inanimate world.”

The "I" and the "not-I"

Simone Weil:

Creation: good broken up into pieces and scattered throughout evil.

The cleavage between the “I” and the “not-I”: the only way the All can experience surprise and relationship. It can do this only upon meeting the Other, which must first be separated from the self. But creation cleaved thusly carries the shadow of self-will and dismissal of the Other into a thing. So that no longer will “I” delight in relationship, but will, instead, lord over and consume creation in my greedy avarice to prove that “I” am the center of the universe.

Kasatka (an orca at Sea World) held her trainer under water twice (for less than a minute) instead of performing tricks as was expected. She held him by the foot in her massive jaws. She performs as many as eight times a day, 365 days a year. They called her protest abnormal.

A thought on conscious suffering

Simone Weil:

The false God changes suffering into violence. The true God changes violence into suffering.

The false: escape from terror or dread by means of a substitute sacrifice (i.e., if I sacrifice a sheep on the altar – or read about a Baghdadi child losing his arm to a mine in the newspaper, or even make a lot of busy-ness in my life – I can reassure myself that it is not I, not I who is suffering or dying. I am alive).

The true: making oneself a sacrifice (i.e., submit and bear the suffering consciously).