Yesterday, I was sitting on a bench out on a boardwalk suspended over a cattail marsh.  I felt so absolutely wonderful.  I could taste the love in the air.  Not love really in the ordinary sense of the word, but a quality of bliss all around without a thing for which it is a quality.  Just… quality.  Just bliss.  Argh.  Words are impotent.

Nothing in my world was making me feel particularly good.  Rather, the bliss came from some intrinsic essence, something unchangeable.  My mind was just its own small, ordinary place, but out beyond it was my awareness, hovering everywhere.  The awareness.  And it touched everything, and everything was composed of sweet nothings.  My goodness, it was… it is right there.

I don’t know if this makes any sense, but when my awareness opens to this, my mind like a clear, untouchable sky, I always find myself eventually mulling over the same thing.  What of those who are suffering?  I can easily think about this too hard, and of course it almost always winds me back into the coil of my clouded mind, and I walk away sad that I cannot seem to share the luminous unconditional joy, the absolute freedom from suffering.  I keep asking God, or rather IT, how do I share this?

In every moment for as long as I can remember, I have said the same prayer.  I ask to be of some use in bringing suffering hearts into this beautiful sky.  I avail myself to this.  I don’t care what it means for me, because there is no me anyway.  It is the cosmos asking to make this small facet of itself a reflection of the rest of itself.  If I can heal with my joy, okay.  If I can heal with my pain, okay.  Whatever.  But the luminosity is there, and I don’t want a single atom of another being to be apart from it.

In the past few years, every time I experienced a period of luminosity, I would immediately call my Buddhist love.  He would rush to be with me, and I would share my sky with him.  How badly I wanted to share my sky with him!  I would wrap myself around him, hoping it would rub off on him, hoping I could pull him into it and maybe he would never suffer again.

I shared my sky.  And I also rained on him.  Hailstorms and tornadoes.

My mind is like Oklahoma weather.  Weeks go by with a sky so clear and blue, marred by not a wisp, that heaven is laid bare and open.  Unconditional, inexplicable bliss is the fundamental ground of being.  Yet, every now and then, a storm moves in and smacks the earth with its melodramatic renditions of the collective story meandering and playing in all of our heads.  Oklahoma weather is magnificent.  In the hours before a thunderstorm, the sky is green, and the landscape glows yellow as though you were on another planet.  The storms race in swirling and black.  I have never seen such towering, intricate clouds as those I’ve seen in Oklahoma.  It is enough to make a person want to paint.

The swollen rain falls hard, but it doesn’t fall for long.  The clouds empty themselves and drift away in a postcoital calm.  In moments, the sun is out again.  Everything is vibrant with moisture.  The grass is greener.  The bark on the trees is black, and all the leaves glow.  This is just like me.  Am I a work of art?

I wish I could draw a map from the storms to the sky, but the sky is not really another place.  You cannot walk there.  In fact, if you try walking, you’ll just get further away, which is to say, more confused.  You find the sky by looking around in a different way, with different eyes.  I suppose the easiest and quickest way to see it is to believe with all your heart that it is there.  Then, when you catch a glimpse, believe your eyes.  Believe your new eyes.  What you see is not reflected light.  It’s the source.  The seeing IS the light.

Your new eyes are the sky itself.  Eyes in everything.  Perception and object merged without a seam, and all of it with the capacity to self-illuminate.  Aw, forget esoteric babble and just look up.