Enlightenment is not day and night.
Enlightenment is an infinite trail of sunrises
Finding us.
We are birds who will meet of a season
Passing life and truth on to others
Through us
Till we part.
Pieces of the mirror:
Siddhārtha Gautama
Virginia Woolf
Marc Chagall
Stephen Hawking
Anna Karenina.
Suffering’s as much a part of life’s existence
As breath, flesh, and blood.
When Yashoda, foster-mother of the young-boy Krishna, accuses him of eating dirt
Which he denies
She commands him to open his mouth.
In it she sees the timeless universe – all the stars and the rest of space
The distances between
All the land, sea, and air of Earth and all of their creatures
All of the days, yesterday, today, and tomorrow
All the suffering, cures, and rejoice
Including herself.
And gasps.
“My Lord, you may close your mouth.”
There are as many different realities as there are minds and memories to imagine them.
James Joyce once said, when writing to a friend about ‘Ulysses’:
“There is no past, no future; everything flows in an eternal present.”
Enlightenment has just such an absolute quality about it
As though describing an ever steady state
Not subject to action, time or space.
Not subject to the waves and vagaries of human life, though it sees them.
Watching the moon
– Izumi Shikibu
At sunrise
Solitary, mid-sky, a cloud of itself,
I knew myself completely:
No part left out.