A Cool Spring Morning
It was a cool spring morning, full of the anticipation of warmer weather. The earth was softening and the leeks were springing through the spoil. The black moist earth looked and smelled rich and great for growing. The soil seemed to shine and enjoy the intensity of the sun’s warmth. All the earth was waking up from a cold winter of snow and wind. The birds had not yet returned yet standing dignified in the full and expanding stream was a blue heron. It was still, silent and graceful and it had the patience of that old worn creek. It was there doing its thing, waiting for a small fish or insect to float by and with great precision and adequacy it picked its meal.
As one walked along the meadow, and enjoyed the smell and peace of nature, thought was found in no place. Only compassion from the earth and one’s being seemed to join together. It was not to be experienced because then it would come out of comparison. Joy seemed to be everywhere, beginning and ending at the same time. The large maple was a buzz of activity and sap flies were all around it. Off near a large rock one could see the warmth of the sun as it melted the snow. All around the rock on the north side icicles had formed. If you got close with the camera and looked through the lens it was as if you were looking at a mountain. The hanging icicles looked so cold and yet a small bug would see this place as a large mountain in a desolate ice field. Life always is full on, and yet very few people investigate what living is all about.
We seem to be consumed with what happens after death. How can we possibly understand death if we have not fully understood life? So most of our life is a movement of self-centeredness. We try to get as much pleasure as we can, never seeing that the demand for pleasure increases our pain and suffering and for most, suffering and escaping from it has become our main occupation.
We have a tremendous need to be entertained. When our entertainments are denied, we are angry and frightened.
For most of us, living is getting an education so that we can get a job and work, to buy the pleasure we think we want and need. Pleasure has never been the route to happiness. It has set up in us the source of contradiction within. One moment we want one thing and the next moment another. This movement is the self or ego in action. There is no end to self-centered action – only pleasure pain and the need to again fulfill one’s own self-centered activity that leads again to this feeling of being unsatisfied. And again we are off pursuing another desire. Living is a huge field to explore but for most we are only involved in a small little field. Our brains are dominated by thought and all the things thought has put together.
Thought is responsible for many great innovations, like technology, but thought will never be able to create a mountain or a flower. Nature is not the product of thought, it can only describe it. Life is one continuous movement from birth and the beginning of thinking and then death and the ending of thinking. Just because thought ends, that doesn’t mean life is over. Life is more than thought playing itself out, based on how it has conditioned and set patterns and grooves, which is the center of self. When the mind is free from all the movements of self, living and dying are of little consequence.
Coach bri