signs

“All opposites are in reality one thing, not two” – Mark Forstater, _The Tao_

“Reality, as Reality itself, has no opposite” – Neil Douglas Klotz, _The Sufi Book of Life_

“Reality…is ten to the eighth surface-filled polygons a second. “  -- Richard Powers, _Plowing the Dark_

“No, dear, this is the dream.  You’re still in the cell.” – Monty Python skit that all the above quotes brought to mind

You keep walking past signs that you never read, says that quiet voice ever-so-casually from the hypnagogic world, just before it lets me wake.  Now if that isn’t a remark I oughta pay attention to…if only I can remember it long enough to wake up and write it down.  Why can’t those voices give me some kinda advance warning when they’re about to speak?  Countless other times they’ve rivered some profound message my way when I wasn’t close enough to consciousness to catch it, and could only watch it slip silvery away, trout-like, out of mind’s grasp…

And I'm trying to ponder the nature of Reality before I'm fully awake, and so, naturally, I get up thinking of an old Monty Python skit.  A guy is being tortured in a medieval dungeon, crying out in pain.  And then suddenly he wakes up in a lawn chair in an English country garden, with a woman handing him a glass of lemonade.  “Mum!” he cries out.  “I had the most horrible dream – I was being tortured…”  She interrupts him, in a sweet motherly voice.  “No dear, this is the dream.   You’re still in the cell.”  And the scene wavers again, and he goes back to being lashed with a whip, crying out…  Something of metaphor there?  Trying to wake up and can’t even tell when we’ve awakened?  Continuing to suffer, when we don’t have to fall back into sleep and dream?…I don’t know.  Maybe or maybe not.  But skit made me laugh.  With some kind of recognition.

All the other quotes are words I read just in the last week.  Talking about walking past signs.  They're everywhere.  And I know good and well that there's a Reality infinitely larger and more exuberant than ordinary perception allows for.  It's been courting me for years.  Flirting with me sleeping and waking, in words more than clear, and in voices I may never comprehend with anything more than startled wonder.  And sometimes, with gifts so straightforward I can't even see them.

But this morning does have room for consciousness.  This room in which I wake very literally is a room for consciousness.  Clean high ceilings, wide mountain-gazing windows, woodstove beaming clean warmth.  Beautiful stones and crystals color all the corners.  Singing bowls wait on a table.  This hand-built house, I just noticed while lying here staring at roof angles, is a seven-sided polygon.  Full of silence and spaciousness.  No clocks or electronics, no internet, no artificial interruptions that I don’t bring here with me.  I’m only here temporarily, and I see the gift of it.  I'm slowing down.  I’m listening.  Today I don’t invite any distractions.  I have attention to pay.  I want to see those signs.

Sun overhead moves slowly upward, reaches zenith in its own good time.  Or, it waits there for the earth, planet leaning slow and sure into their daily embrace.

Trees out on the hillslope grow at exactly their own speed.  Into their very own shape.  According to what water and earth feed them.  And what fire and drought don’t take away.

Stream down in the canyon follows only natural laws of supply and demand.  Takes what passage the channel opens for it.  Brings what abundance the higher places have given. Offers always what it has to give, no more and no less.

Fire burns at the rate of the life each log has accumulated.  Strong solid trees, some achingly still full of life when felled, release their substance only at their will.  Others seem weightless, glad to go.  For each, I mourn a moment.  Then give thanks, as they bring relief to my chill.

Yeast rises quicker with heat, but finds a slow way with even a little warmth.  Bread will bake just as well over hot coals as in an oven.  Which is nice, since there’s not a regular oven here.  Yes, I baked some beautiful bread over the coals left inside the woodstove.  Just because I could.  It tastes a little like a campfire, but I don’t mind.  Joyful at the extravagance of having the time to bake real bread.

Time for the real is there – here – just outside this worried tangle of everydays.  Dreams and wisdom flow always, just outside the daily construct.  Finding them is waking up from too much sleep and inertia, finally willing to meet the day.  For me, yes, it was waking from a recurring dream of suffering, into the dangerous peace of healing and freedom.  Now, today, it's turning off the radio (literal or otherwise) and stepping outside the house, down to the river’s edge (here, less literal but just as present:  Flow). Surging there, swift and deep and sometimes cold, Reality’s constant conduit.  Often these not-seen banks overflow, watering the fields that feed us, in response to need.  To the relief of soul’s drought.  Sometimes even in response to asking. 

THIS is the real world!  That other one, that hyperrushed people-confined construct is the false one.  Everything real moves at its own pace.  In its own balance.  In its own symmetric freedom.  In its own perfection of natural cause and effect.  Why in the world we always trying to push it, restrain it, change it? 

I'm stepping out of the house.  I'm kneeling at the river's edge.  I won't walk past this place in the usual blur.  My eyes are starting to focus.  I can read the signs.  Please.