Day Three Hundred and sixty five

Dark and light wait to be known.

Rising from the eastern sea,

insight gleams all on its own,

through calm and storm, touch and tears

it does not move, but does not rest,

while lives are spun and ships are built

to undertake some bloody quest,

that empty jars of hearts be filled.

Here on the point an empty lighthouse

means not to divide

by grace the windswept to bay found

or to angry rocks to die,

Ah, but this is how we are not known;

We pay wrecked hearts no heed

and compass them with precious stone

that they not break or therefore bleed.

My love by touching of your gift

in pitch black night I occupy

the light that guides my lonely ship

to bring you treasure in the dawn.

to sing in salted spray your song,

the treasure treasure cannot buy.

Day Three Hundred and sixty four

Working with the stone on the next to last day of this diary. I find ecstasy in touching, I am better at staying with this object, returning to concentration and often noticing hindrances.

After the fading of hindrances, what else is there? In one way, desire, ill-will, sloth, restlessness and doubt are the stuff I usually live with. They are what the skandhas combine with to fuel the self, that subtle and persistent sense of watching from a safe distance, and then protecting that place with all possible means.

Believing in a self, I stock phantom barrels of desire for my journeys. Believing in a self, I hold to this view or that.

I sail to bring the stone home to my love. She is more valuable than diamonds or even sunlight, or water. On the way, fate tears the ship, between so many different rocks of opposites, but bound to my practice, I see them, and navigate on.

Day Three Hundred and sixty three

It is night on a sea of names.

Far away, nuclei fall together and throw plasma,

while the moon sighs, profaned by our measured months.

She turns yellow in the branches,

moving at a perfect speed.

Day Three Hundred and sixty two

Who is captain of this ship, when the rigging is set by the ensigns, the fuel by the firemen, the course by the lieutenant? Who is the captain of this ship, when the admiral put the fleet to sea, the queen ordered the fleet built?

Who holds the glass to look for land, and to call the alarm before the rocks?

Who abandons war for one fair touch?

Who lets go their grip, before being sewn into sailcloth, and sent sliding into grey green water?

Day Three Hundred sixty one

I consider touching, and how I suppose it to be more immediate than seeing, but that is not so. I have had as much or more difficulty identifying what I am with, to stay with what I am touching, as I would watching an eagle from half a mile away, or considering a school of fish in the waves.

All of the sense doors open upon their sense objects and cross a mysterious gulf to get to them, to receive them, to be with them. In all cases what is made is conditional, a rough form that is then bent to our grasp.

And yet in meditation, feeling gives way to contact, which gives way to sense doors and the forms they open upon to give names to. Here, the captain is found to be brave, so brave that he need not wear his cap or stripes. He needs no name.

Day Three Hundred sixty

Sailing from memory to expectation, I know not where I am.

Yet the salt wind blows, then rends the sails apart.

I am the vessel of a sextants guide,

who maps the outline of my heart.

Day Three Hundred fifty nine

Wisdom is like carrying water without a bucket, like painting, like whispers, like unveiled innocence, tart reverence, and torn determination.