Just mu

02/09/2006 9:11 AM-9:37 AM

Odd experience yesterday. I walked into the library to start my shift. A man had collapsed at the exit. They called the paramedics and I realized that I was watching a man with a close view of his own death. The fear came and I thought the worst thought. As this man goes, so go I. I will die and I cannot know what comes after. There is a chance of hell.

With this thought, came the accompanying emotions: terror and anger. They stayed with me even after they carried the man away in a stretcher. They lingered and suffused me. I hated life. But I was terrified of death. Better to never have been born. Koholeth speaking again, in my voice. After an hour or so of this, I remembered my zazen. I remembered my own sutra: emotions float through, like thoughts. Look at them, acknowledge them, greet them, but then go on your way again. “Enough,” I said, like the lover of Kira Knightly in ‘Love Actually,’ “enough.” Emotions are facts to be acknowledged and then released. To hold onto any emotion past its time is to let it rot. Whether that emotion be pleasant or painful.

So there it is. What they told us in kindergarten was true, but you have to find your own way to say it or it makes no sense – just another stupid and cruel admonishment in the long line of stupid and cruel admonishments that they handed out like medals at the Special Olympics. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. You’re here, right now. Emotions flit through like sensations of bumps on a wall as you drag your fingers across them. To be pointlessly pessimistic is just as shallow as being pointlessly optimistic. Find the limits of knowing and then discover all you can about the inside of the box. There are some walls that simply won’t move. Pick up you BB gun and go out into the fog, hunting for the divine in sleeping ironwood and invisible birds. All is transient here. Even transcendence. We consist of moist mathematical equations. The lines are still there, just smaller. Complexity is merely a large number of simplicities, all piled together. I remembered the thing that came after the first time I found the worst thought, before I fell asleep. Zazen is death that you come back from. Zazen is not peace, though it can be a conduit to it. Zazen is stillness. Zazen is ma. Zazen is mu. Zazen is the words that continue after you stop reading. Enlightenment is enlightenment in the laundry basket. I came as a rat. I came as whore. I came as the child I was before. Just pick it up, greet it, put it down, and go on your way.