Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
there is a field. I will meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase each other
doesn’t make any sense.
-Rumi
Your lover’s unbroken glow,
wrapped in a wool blanket by a fire. A sisterhood of sweating trees interrupted with
marble temples. A cliff, red and vast and angry, convinced of its girth and
immortality, even as it dies into a blue and vaster and dancing sea.
Take a moment to recall
those times you really sunk into the vibrant pulse of what surrounded you and
remembered there may be such a thing as God.
Did you wish everyone,
regardless of the boxes of our births, could share in the privileged surrender
of that recollection?
There is a hill in
Southern Oregon, six miles from the misnamed Pacific as the crow flies, where I
sat at sunset to connect to you and to everyone, and recall what I knew before I
was born.
Follow the Rogue River
to Kimball Hill Road and weave higher until words fail and you realize you are
wonderfully, horribly alone, and always have been.
Before you there is a
painting made of real life. The pines and firs cling to the Earth’s scalp and
to each other. Are they afraid of you, or are you the guest of honor at their fest
noz? The horizon exhales a white wall—it can breathe like us, no, but they’re only
clouds—that leaves only the river’s mirage unblanketed. A steel bridge at the
delta gives way to hundred-ton rock arches that giants left behind, but from
this hill, from your moment above and truly aware of them, they are smaller
than you will ever be.
Apart from the
occasional busy fly, whose self-importance reminds you of the you who scurries through
the days; the only sound is far-away wind, carressing each pine needle like an
orphan found. Hundreds shiver for and whistle in love. There is more than
enough to go around and still reach embraceable you.
At the end of all
things, this is the most perfect sound. It is the alpha-omega whisper of
everyone’s Mother, leaning in to your soul through your ears, which have turned
purple from screaming that everything is just too bright. This tree wind is her liquid
soul expressed and she does not need to stop for breath. She is breath. Its
resonance with your remembered soul massages the questions out of your pores
with gentle fire.
“Shhhhhhh…just listen. Listen to nothing. At the heart of it you
and I are together, Beloved.”
I sat on God’s hill
and wanted to hear that purr forever, a purr accompanying the painting around
me, the moment chosen for me.
Some day all I think I
know will end. When it does, I want to see it sung before me like a painting.
Everything that mattered and didn’t will unroll before me like the Rogue River
Valley. If I have labored to love and live like a creator, the tears that have
carved red hollows into my skin and bones will evaporate into blue blurs,
pines, firs, giant’s stones, which in turn collapse just as gladly into the
hint of an immortal horizon. And I will no longer be a gasping, grasping pine
needle, a self-important fly. I will be a painter on a hill with gold in her
veins.
And all I will feel the
impulse to turn my head slightly and realize you are silently beside me, and we are awake together as never
before.
And all we will hear
as we melt is shhhhhhh…….
