My yoga mat has disappeared into the ground under my feet.
My ashram has become the coffee counter, a bad joke exchanged with the barista, a friendly smile creeping over a frozen face, and the whole world willing us along.
My temple is the shopping mall, the dentist’s waiting room, the empty meadow in the morning with its soft yellow light and virginal air.
My guru is the incubating roar in the belly, the melancholy of the evening and the hope and despair of raw existence itself.
Nothing needs to be added.
My enlightenment is the ordinary moment, this mundane experience drenched in the sweet nectar of my own attention.
My origin is the breath and the breath is my destination.
My lineage is the hungry cat greeting me on my evening walk, ambling beside me awhile, rubbing her fur against my shin, her fur soft like the cashmere blanket grandma used to wrap around us as the nights came in early, fur becoming skin, and the cat nonchalantly moving on to peruse a discarded sandwich wrapper, and me walking on.
My spirituality is deep in the earth; it is in the mud, the heat, the bowels, the awkward and the inconvenient, the cry for mother and the courage to penetrate unexplored regions of the psyche. It is the yearning for home and the happily exhausted return.
My bliss is nothing the mind could ever grasp, not in a billion years of searching.
My joy is simple, like those who have lived a full life and are ready to die.
I lie down in the meadow, my backpack my pillow, my hands entering into the silky, sticky grass, my entire life reduced to a single thought and memory and momentary vision, and then that is gone too, and I am gone with it all, replaced by the meadow itself, its soft yellow light and its clean invigorating air, its hope and its promise, its fullness and its mercy.
Do not look for me. You will not find me here, or recognise me if you do. I am invisible because I have become all that is seen and all that is known and unknown still.
I do not practise spirituality. I have been destroyed, deconstructed, de-boned and born again, reconstituted as man, formless as form. I have been recreated inseparable from this ordinariness, resurrected with the birds belly laughing on the electric wires at dawn.
My ashram has become the coffee counter, a bad joke exchanged with the barista, a friendly smile creeping over a frozen face, and the whole world willing us along.
My temple is the shopping mall, the dentist’s waiting room, the empty meadow in the morning with its soft yellow light and virginal air.
My guru is the incubating roar in the belly, the melancholy of the evening and the hope and despair of raw existence itself.
Nothing needs to be added.
My enlightenment is the ordinary moment, this mundane experience drenched in the sweet nectar of my own attention.
My origin is the breath and the breath is my destination.
My lineage is the hungry cat greeting me on my evening walk, ambling beside me awhile, rubbing her fur against my shin, her fur soft like the cashmere blanket grandma used to wrap around us as the nights came in early, fur becoming skin, and the cat nonchalantly moving on to peruse a discarded sandwich wrapper, and me walking on.
My spirituality is deep in the earth; it is in the mud, the heat, the bowels, the awkward and the inconvenient, the cry for mother and the courage to penetrate unexplored regions of the psyche. It is the yearning for home and the happily exhausted return.
My bliss is nothing the mind could ever grasp, not in a billion years of searching.
My joy is simple, like those who have lived a full life and are ready to die.
I lie down in the meadow, my backpack my pillow, my hands entering into the silky, sticky grass, my entire life reduced to a single thought and memory and momentary vision, and then that is gone too, and I am gone with it all, replaced by the meadow itself, its soft yellow light and its clean invigorating air, its hope and its promise, its fullness and its mercy.
Do not look for me. You will not find me here, or recognise me if you do. I am invisible because I have become all that is seen and all that is known and unknown still.
I do not practise spirituality. I have been destroyed, deconstructed, de-boned and born again, reconstituted as man, formless as form. I have been recreated inseparable from this ordinariness, resurrected with the birds belly laughing on the electric wires at dawn.
