Koan

Recently I've had some 'half baked' notion or other in my awareness. I've not really been able to articulate to myself what it is. And so I decided to see if blogging would draw it out. What came to me in part after listening to Leonard Cohen was a previous post -this one - about the ground of our being and everyday life. But this is not all. More specifically I suppose the notion is more related to attachment and ultimately death. Freedom as alluded to in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets - 'costing not less than everything' is I think also inextricably tied up with the other part of that poem - that we 'arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'. Much has been written about ego death and physical death, attachment, surrender and the various forms of knowing. But this is both poetry and fingers pointing at the moon. In the everyday, in the difficulties of any physical, mental and emotional state to what extent can I surrender to what is and even be in playful samadhi? Not to give up in depression looking down, a condition which holds tightly on to the way I want it to be, but to give up and look up or rather to expand to hold what is. Why? Why what? Why expand? Is there a subtle holding on to me, mine, being safe and happy in this? Of course there is. A constant dance of subject and perceived object and emerging in that a tiredness and a giving up sometimes into liberation and sometimes into tightness. The Four Quartets are a favourite of DC and in his wonderful way, he has printed and framed the verses including 'to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time'. They sit on the sideboard in the entrance to our home clustered by various papers and objects which are yet to find their way to their proper place as we negotiate everyday living whilst having work done on the house. The builder's dust and materials etc. mingle with displaced items of life as we 'camp' in the spare bedroom and keep our clothes in what will be the sitting / reflective / meditation room. The dust is getting to me. It and the clouds in my eyes caused by PVD together with the other works yet to be started so as to bring the house into a shape more harmonious with our way of being feel like a constant challenge to be accepted worked with and through. This juxtaposition in my mind of everyday tightness, tiredness and 'spiritual' 'position' hangs koan like as this 'half baked' notion.

DC will say to me that I need to learn how to be happy. He knows that I do know how to be happy, but tend to pessimism. He also says quite rightly, that pessimism is just a way to avoid disappointment. The koan constantly shifts and I wonder is there is any real underlying movement towards liberation or if it just adjusts position staying largely in the same 'place'. I try to constantly wipe the dust (of unhelpful thoughts and ways) from the mirror (of awareness) knowing that the mirror 'has no stand nor any place for dust to land' yet the knowing is still through a glass darkly, though the sense of the koan is also a knowing in some sense of it's resolution.

We're going to spend this long weekend by the sea for a much needed rest from the dust etc. DC loves the sea and it will be lovely to walk along the cliff tops and beach. Friends will stay with us for a night and I'll let go (I hope) of anxieties about getting our house in the shape of the home that feels 'right'. Coming 'home' being its own koan!