Late, Late Summer
Mountain, Sea, Sky watercolour by Rami Schandall, September 2020.
For the month of September, the meditation circle which I lead has been working with a metaphor practice:
body as mountain
breath as the sea
sky — mind
This is an invitation to think / sense / feel into these archetypes of the natural world, to contemplate their qualities and notice how our embodied experience might echo them. The imagery is boundless, but we can start from here:
- Natural stillness; a weighty, simple, steady “being-ness.”
- Breath and heart in an endless cyclical motion of in and out, tidal, wave-like.
- Equanimity, untroubled by clouds, winds, storms. All aspects of the sky (mind) are welcome, they are always sky.
Clouds come and go, where from, where to?
Thoughts and feelings come and go — where from, where to?
In 2012, I took a course with the zen poet, Peter Levitt, called “Found in Translation.” He assigned poems for us to translate, from brilliant poets across centuries and languages — none of which were we fluent with. We were given the “bare bones” of the poems, literal translations of each word in their original order. The task was to create poems that carried the meaning from that language and culture into our own — a brilliant exercise in lateral thinking and intuition, to grope our way blindly toward the sense of these things, which were nearly meaningless in raw form.
A poem from this course comes to mind with our mountain metaphor, “Deer Park” or “Deer Sanctuary” by a Chinese poet from the Tang Dynasty, Wang Wei. There are many different translations available in print and online. Here is mine, staying very close to the source:
Deer Sanctuary
Empty mountain, no-one to see
yet words echo
return, brightness, to deep shadowed forest
return again, light — shine
over green moss
(after Wang Wei, 699-761 CE)
Wang Wei was a devout buddhist, and the title likely refers to the deer sanctuary where Gautama Buddha taught the dharma. I understand the mountain, not as a thing to contemplate or observe from the outside, but as the embodied meditator: the witness, our “original face.” I am the mountain when, in fleeting quietude, experience simply IS. In the uncomplicated, pure “being-ness” of sadana, the light returns once more to deep shadows in the sanctuary of life.
Contact me to learn more about our Tuesday Sangha, 7:30 pm ET weekly.
