The Secret Is Not To Linger

I was twenty years old when I discovered the importance of following - and studying - the moon. D. had fled to England and I was entering what turned out to be a nearly twenty year tutelage in grief. It ended on Mount Ascutney, though it took a while to see this.

The pace at which one plays Fur Elise naturally shifts the psychological focus. We have all navigated the stomachs of bears, we have all grasped in vain at the whale's baleen in passing.

Paradox is simply what nonduality looks like to the unhealed mind.

Rather than work I sit by the window and watch Juncos, once my favorite bird, pick through crusty snow for seed. Sentences, not lines, and the distinction matters. Listen.

Frost flowers on the bedroom window, begging a magnifying glass, and begetting a kind of happiness I imagine would frustrate most scientists. Snow piles on fence posts and in the gray distance - where mind eclipses what is otherwise measurable - the same old crow rises and falls, rises and falls.

She is cooking with duck eggs again. Clotheslines, winter goldenrod begetting wrens, and undoing mistaken for failure.

So many books piled in every corner, some with dust, others stuffed with makeshift markers, falling over, spilling out, pushed aside to make room for more, forgotten and rediscovered, part of the I-don't-want-to-wake-up dance of which we are all now mortally tired. And yet.

Yes is not always the answer! At the level of the body we are not one but many, and the fantasy we are otherwise is merely another way of keeping awareness of true oneness at bay. Spirit willingly devolves backwards to reach us - through cheesecake, orgasm, sunsets, art. The secret is not to linger where the call is heard but to follow.

Hence the dead bury the dead and the living go on - in spirals, on trails, over the burnishing sea - to Jerusalem, and Home.