It’s been a long time since I felt like writing. What’s the point of using words when we can speak directly, with being to being? But then what’s the point of form when everything is in emptiness?
Maybe words give proof to the truth people perceive with their hearts. The messages received by the heart are verified through words, and otherwise they would not believe their hearts. Maybe form serves the same purpose. Form gives proof to what we perceive of emptiness, the mystical experience. Like looking in a mirror–the emptiness verifies itself through form.
A lot of people need words from me right now–lots of different words–and without those words, there is frustration, disappointment, a sense of separateness, or even animosity. But I want to fall silent and stay that way. My reply is in the ribbon of grass between my fingers, not the pen. In the humid air blanketing my skin. In every quanta of form I see them, you, I, reflected. That sounds poetic in an almost alienating way–which is my point exactly.
If you would have me say those words that you would most want to hear, right now, what would they be?
If you knew with absolute certainty that you could speak words to someone and they would hear and understand them completely with their whole being, what would you say?
Sacred is any form which offers, to a given mind, an exit to the void, transparency to the divine. Rather than striving to be loving, strive to be sacred. And to see the sacred, to see all forms as sacred, and in being sacred, love pours out without contrivance.
Words, like form, are most sacred when they are transparent to the silence, giving entrance to the still divine love from which they came. How can we speak words like that?
Just as I was writing about sacredness as transparency of form, I was listening to music playing in a cafe where they sell crepes, and I inquired about the artist. Crystal Castles. A few hours later, in a different context with different people, someone recommended a German group called Glass House, or Glashaus. An interesting coincidence. Both transparent forms in which we reside.
I am back in the town where I lived for the last six years, visiting briefly, contending with a jumble of emotional memories, tumbling through one association after another, familiarity mixed with disorientation, the same world but upside down.
The discombobulation is good. Don’t look for a place to hang on, I remind myself. Let the tumbling direct you to your center. Not the place that doesn’t get tumbled. The center is in the tumbling. Who is tumbling? This pure awareness, this beingness. The tumbling itself. The silence within the noise.
I am literally at the center of the country’s biggest farmer’s market. The market circles a capital building skirted by vast, beautiful lawns of grass with shading trees. Half the town is revolving around the capital square, the whole market spinning, while I lie half asleep on my purple blanket in the grass, very still and very content.
I am reading a new book, an unexpected gift from my sacred friend, called “Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics,” which details that longing for silence and the impulse to transcend everyday social reality that has been gripping me. Not to find stillness in a cave, but to find it in the noise of the ordinary world.
Ironically, as I read it, my cell phone is basting in an oven. Last night, I spilled water on it, and when I woke up, I realized that the keypad no longer worked, and all the while, my phone was calling people who had recently called me. Unsuspecting friends received repeated calls from me until 1:30 in the morning and again at the crack of dawn. When they answered, they heard only silence. Lord, that cracks me up to no end.
Someone suggested I remove the battery and sim card and place it in the oven for the day with only the pilot light on. Another friend remarked, “Ahhh, the flavor of a slowly simmering cell phone! I prefer to leave the sim card in and baste it with a mild hollandaise sauce.” With so many calling on me right now to use words, that seems a fitting fate for my cell phone.
Mmmmm, words.
