Chicago. 2 AM. Witnessing the cityscape sparkily stand beneath a thick gray sky.
I remember the nicest fog, last summer, cutting the buildings in half and slipping, like sleek cats, out of alleys. There was a building with sharp vampiric towers jutting out from the precipitous swell. After elevated back up to the twentieth floor, nothing could be seen out the window but the massive cloudspell the entire city was under. I took photographs of my brother bulkily sitting, smoking, looking out into the blankness, the fullness. I wanted to be the qualities of that fog. We took a drive to the Ba'hai temple earlier that day. The green was strikingly bright along the lake, the highrises blind to their usual view across the water. The temple was Heaven-like, symmetrical as God's face. I snapped shots of it, struggling to align the picture window with the building. Later viewing this photo, it was slightly askew, obviously imperfect, like a human face. God's face, human's face- the same.
I dissipate into a billion tiny fractions, and swirl around my self and self self selfishly self capitulate. All the while forgetting my self becoming spaced spaced space.
Strange how the feeling of Love seems to pick a subject and embody that completely, leaving the seer of love perfectly befuddled as to how to access that love if it is not possible to always be in the presence of that subject. Curious, and beautiful. The seer feels the heart slowly ripping open, exposing bursts of light. She gasps, graps for something to fix her, realizing soon the only fix is the recognition of Truth. Wholeness is at her fingertips, on her lips. She waits through the agony and opens herself wider, wider. Not long until she has space enough for the great forgiveness.
I remember a sunset, last week, in El Salto. Standing at the fence, behind the Zendo, the colors were brighter, deeper, wider, than I could remember colors being. The chill of the evening held my body in a soft glow- the effort to keep heat in, and my hand was safe in someone else's pocket. A big white dog cut through the grass. The valley below was open arms, an invitation to breathe. A "flying moment," as I would have said when I was 7, always believing there was a pocket of time each day when the light and clouds were just right over the mountains that I could literally fly into the scenery.
The graveyard of passed masters seeped gentle kind sorrow through my busy protections. I was penetrated by an understated, undiluted, simple bliss. I could see my children growing up on this slope, running with little finch-down tuft dogs down the mountainside. I could feel my body warmly wrapped in a scarf watching them run, from the porch. There was a Great Mercy. There was a freefall and a regathering. Breathe in and out and stand in the place between. I stood and I breathed, in the dream, out the dream.