36

The fireflies come early this year.

Or is it the stars are especially bright, especially close.

She tells me to remember before sleep that truth will not forget the one who seeks only truth.

She tells me not to question form so intensely but rather to be thankful for "the multiplicity - the muchness, yes? - of Brahman."

The journey began a thousand times a thousand years ago.

There are caves in which fires are still burning, and mountain tops on which the mist is only now beginning to clear.

It is important to walk only that path which is one's own, despite the many that beckon, and the many walkers who cry out for aid.

Only then can the supreme happiness inherent in all form reveal itself and be accepted.

Before dawn, wracked still by the duality of pleasure and pain, by the sense that I dimly remember what I swore to forget, I walk slowly down the hill.

A firefly settles slowly down through rustling maple leaves into the tall grass, the chicory that is not blue now but the memory of blue.

"I want what I want" - what does it cost to say that?

The ocean runs up onto the shore and falls back.

Something within us is moving as well - rising and falling, rising and falling and - somehow - settling.

I close my eyes and see a fox tail soaked with dew.

A crow watching me from atop a distant pine.

Longing is only a problem when you allow it to become a pursuit, she says.

Let longing instruct you as to what is absent, and then discover for yourself whether it is truly absent or merely another example of spiritual forgetfulness.

She reminds me again that the path I have chosen teaches one there is no world.

The dog goes farther and wider than I do and comes back with her tongue lolling, her sides heaving.

I make tea quietly, drink it as the sun rises,  attending to the interior light, its wavering refulgence my own.