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Sep 11, 2000

Turn, and Return

Home.
I did get home.
A process of reassemblage.
Reassembling a Self torn asunder by too much caring, too much concern.
These take us out of ourselves, which is the path to ecstasy, but we are tethered to our flesh, and to the facts of Life. Encumbered by the pain that caring costs us, and which being alive guarantees us. The Self is both a shield against this pain, and the focal point for it.
But if we know pain, we also know joy.
These two are but the extreme ends of a continuum of feeling.
To live is to feel it all.
We like to say the joy outweighs the pain.

Somewhere between them, a numbness which also serves us well. Habits of enjoyment that are less than Joy, but better than pain. There the reassembly begins. I listened to a baseball game on the car radio, the broadcast like a beacon, drawing me back across the onion fields of Ontario, back to the tumult of America.
Back to endless noise and news.
Back in New York, I flick on the news,
I fall back into habits,
reluctantly, at first,
but soon relaxing into routine.

You might say the ultimate goal of spiritual practice is to make the routine extreme.
Or vice versa.
It’s another way of saying,
Everything All At Once In One Place Here Now...
the Unique become ubiquitous.
But here I’m reduced to the usual play of opposites.
The true object of spiritual practice does not conform to words.
Easier to forget, falling into routine.
Forgetfulness is the best anesthetic.

It is my goal not to forget.
Not to ignore.
Not to miss the thing that’s right in front of my face
(which has been know to happen,
even in the Park).

My practice in the Park is a sort of hyper-routine.
If we look closely, and consistently, routines reveal irregularities, and auguries of the origin and the ultimate may be found therein.
That is one sort of practice, and easier to follow than the sort I went through at Lake Erie. The penetrating moment, the condensation of spiritual crisis, I suppose that is what I’m asking for, after all, and all the time,
but Life is not really lived that way.

That sort of moment is a vision of something beyond this Life. A glimpse earned more through circumstance than practice. But the circumstance is simply being alive, and practice can help us to manage Life’s coruscating moments, which are all ecstasies, though we may call them griefs or joys.
Tears are the ecstasy of grief,
and tears I’ve known,
but let them fall in ceremony,
taught by the intersection of Life and Land and Love.

Such a gift I have learned to elicit, but only through a humble practice,
offering all my attention,
receiving,
(though I do not ask it)
attention in return.

****************

Back in the Park I notice, for the first time this year, a retraction of the foliage. This is not a projection of my inner state; this is real. The lowering angle of the sun’s arc reinforces the sense of change. I’ve been away, and the turn towards Winter has begun.

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