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.

Day Three Hundred and fifty eight

Touching the stone I notice the singular nature of mind; perhaps not so much the effort to concentrate, but the removal of distraction and a simple awareness of how things are. The fact that an encounter with anything of any length is made up of discrete contacts gives some clue to the nature of mind, and it's arising with contact, it's impermanence at base.

At peace, I consider the losses of family, friends and myself. The losses, too, are made up of so many objects and events that have changed and gone.

Only their bows to change allow me to acknowledge them now.

Day Three Hundred and fifty seven

A burial today and lots of family history with Jeanne and family. We send Metta to her lost father, that he may find his way.

We run to the lighthouse together, turn on a gentle guiding light, letting go of doubt.

Day Three Hundred and fifty six

The way out of the harbor is narrow. And why would I want to sail, anyway? Toward nothingness, toward an uncertain universe? I cannot stay here, in the gossip-ridden village of my mind.

A brave companion helps, perhaps the memory of a good dog. I learn to apply friendship to very complicated states of mind, which hiss and writhe, whisper false prophecy. I do not believe, for they call upon tender wounds with salt for bandages, because I practice allowing for the presence of kindness, which loves before thinking.

Day Three Hundred and fifty five

The bell of opposites rings so loudly when struck near an unprepared ear.

Peace and unrest, trust and fear, death and life, belief and doubt, all clamor for attention, cry for their place, claw for nourishment.

Without clinging to view, there is no hunger, no nourishment, no sound, and no silence.

Day Three Hundred and fifty four

When I touch the stone, I also think of things. Yet touching feels continuous. This is an illusion because the mind can only recognize one thing at a time. Further still, even if 'only' touching, it is made of many impulses. How fascinating, then, that concentration can be developed at all.

In any case, I consider latent impulses, latent energy. How and why does an object look like a stream of thought when it can be interrupted by meditation? Ah, that's better; interrupt my 'stream' of thoughts with meditation. It appears to me that while the mind has only the capacity for one thing at a time, it activates mind files and body cues continually. Why does it go back to one or another for the creation of a thought process?

I consider some of the games I play; 'smarter than', 'stupider than', 'considerate' (as vs some inconsiderate being), 'safer', 'stronger', 'weaker' (righteously of course). Can I let go of any of them? Perhaps if I observe how they make me.

Day Three Hundred and fifty three

I notice that I am full of expectation, before any events occur. Why do I cling to what is not yet? What is beyond this selfishness?

I prove myself only to me, but that is still an effort, a proof.

Day Three Hundred and fifty two

I touch and notice the feeling. I encounter the stone in time. Touching leads to concentration and then there is nothing else, no other objects, for a brief time. Suddenly, there is all the world without identification, without my marking, free and open.

Day Three Hundred and fifty one

Home late. "It doesn't matter," say the crickets. "Yes it does," they also say. There are so many things to be done in life. There is nothing of life I have made, but for my rare moments of attention to it.

At the shore, my sister and I found a silver dollar. It was a fish without a tail, shimmering, the same on both sides, with a bright eye. It moved its mouth for air in my hand. We said a prayer for it and set it in the water, where it would die. I considered the difficulties in sending metta; doubt, other thoughts, the spinning compass of attention, and above all, the presumed difference between fish and me. Yes, I still have my temporary rudder, but otherwise, we breathe and see together.

The eye is bright, bright as diamond waves. The heart is light, light as dawn.

Day Three Hundred and fifty

Late entry after return from beach trip

The waves crash on the shore... Much has been built at seaside by man, but the waves just keep crashing, one after another after another after another, in fall and sift and roil and build and crest and fall, without any beginning or ending, with no place to put a finger or even an eye. And yet, they wait for eye and hand to touch them, to play their trembling keys.

I sit on the edge of the mattress with my breath. It goes out to the sea with moist air, does not question the troubles of life.

Day Three Hundred and forty nine

I find that there is nothing I need try very hard to do. I do not assume that I cannot see and know reality. I suppose I did for a long time, doubted my experience of contact and release from craving, and tried very very hard to get to a place full of evidence.

When I am not someplace else, there are more simple and honest names for things, and vice versa. If I can notice all the naming I am doing, all the trying I am doing, the essence of things becomes more plain, and more accessible to being let go of.

Effort aimed at tomorrow necessarily falls short. Effort aimed at yesterday brings old troubles back around, but effort aimed here, now, with faith in seeing what is, allows me to bring healing, know how things are, a bright cascade of ocean wave.

Day Three Hundred and forty eight

Time and again I return to nothing to hold. After a host of small miracles, a torrent of moderate disasters, and a sea still as glass, I have the choice to either compare or let go.

What is this that caresses and gently chooses to allow for love to be gathered? It is the same hand that cares for pain, except that pain is healed into love.

Day Three Hundred and forty seven

I hold the stone and consider the qualities of the entire stone. It is of the size to be available as a single object of meditation by touch. I feel it pressing against my thumb, around the inside of my index and middle finger, cupped by weight in my palm. Does the stone feel me? Surely, I do not feel the stone but for its pressing upon my hand, and it makes the space to be felt, as much as me; and in this case, is the much more hard and present object against a receptive hand.

Such is the case with the world that meets my senses; were I but to consider it, it would take on the life that it has, which is greater, sweeter, and deeper than anything I could write about. After all, a door is meant to be opened, not to be the world itself.

Day Three Hundred and forty six

I touch the stone and my mind wanders; pretty places where my thoughts are in tune, primitive, and clear as starlight. I find so many ports of intrigue and delight off the course of the way.

I stop and gather greetings. How long should I linger? I watch and learn; dance without drinking, close my eyes in this comfortable place without catching a wink, long enough for my new friends to have fallen asleep; then I journey on.

Day Three Hundred and forty five

Sometimes my approach to meditation feels like settling into a fog of bad dreams, as if it is not safe for body or soul, that there is some poison in the air, something dangerous but unseen where I am going, even where I am found.

For a moment I see all the hindrances as one united force, with doubt's dark reign of the mind at the helm. Nearby, there is a place that holds all things. I can, no matter the headwind, aim at the heart of freedom.

Day Three Hundred and forty four

Noticing the rarity and difficulty of direct touching. Directing the attention toward stone and breath, and having a few brushes with the nature of them. Noticing the subtle ways the mind expresses discomfort with being still, some of which are a typhoon of questions about my own abilities. Laughing a little at the notion that there is no single point, a pinpoint would be too small for the mind, and anything larger the mind would say is too broad. But of course, there is never a single point and there is never a moment in time. All wheels in wheels.

Then, being more with the objects of meditation. Appreciating a 'third person' sense of just breathing, and the whole world letting go from my fantasies. How rarely I have been with anything; mostly I consider 'contact' with things as what I am steering over.