Un-emptiness

 

Un-emptiness

     My eyes change when I step outside my door. I look at every thing more closely, very deeply; macro level. Meadows and fields and river bed; fence line, rock ledge, tree bark. I step slowly through grass as it ages into late summer, leaving spent seed pods, husks of blooms, tromped and fringed leaf edges that were so pretty three months ago. Companions  as old as me now, but only for a season.

     I walk this  path near our house so often that I can recognize individual flowers day by day, in various stages of decay....beginning, middle, end....and gone until next year. The beating sun a metronome that keeps track of it all somehow I guess. I look at them and it feels like a visit to the hospital in someone's last days.

     Not the whole story though......In the midst of it, there are others. Some  plants  grit teeth and persist. It is a wonder to see. They stand defiant in the September heat for weeks and months with chemistry that equips them with the sugars of will.

Shoulders back and chests forward, they dare the sun for another day. Transmute the heat and bask.

And there are the patient ones.

They resist bursting forth in the Springtime, with rain all around and the ground growing warm with hope. They wait and wait. Life revving up all around,  they don't bother to elbow in until everyone else is finished; until the coming of the dog days and interminable heat. I suddenly see a single garish purple spike of a thistle. So different and other-worldly like a Phoenix coming out of the fire.

     And she is also there, a spider in her own perfect timing on this most-purple thistle. So very purple as if tagged with spray paint. She squats and waits for whoever else comes to the color. The closer I look the more I see of her...green luminescence and eerie other-worldly face, and long dangerously prickly legs. So much leg on this lady. 

    

And then this..........Yesterday the rains came again. Cobalt clouds boiled up and exploded. Slamming of water into the dry, thirsty breast of  my Texas.  Joyous and unexpected. The skunk cabbage blooms, almost spent, opened. Bees were moving about. I saw one who was still, head deep in the pollen and as I moved closer I could see a white crab spider that had backed into the bloom and waited to see what would come of it. In that moment I am the spider, still and patient, looking out from my yellow bonnet and waiting to see which pollinator comes. Maybe very hungry. I am also the Bee, hovering around, mindful to gather as much pollen for my people as I can. I see the yellow flower and I land. One last time. Hungry, too. And that was it.

These passion plays are all around me all day long, diverting my gaze from the other stories and unanswered questions of my life.

Why am I so pulled to the stories and rhythms of my meadow, Biggun? Why are these worlds more real to me now any anyone or anything? Why does this give me such joy and hope of something more and bigger than anything that I have known before? How do they portal me seamlessly into our other worlds before and after this short life?

In a second as my eyes focus on such tiny mysteries, my anguish dims down, and the noises in my head quiet. The dark ones, at least. I can immediately see lives before and lives to come with such clarity. 

I can see the vastness of you,                                               ..... and of us and of all things swimming there with a thirsty grasshopper.

      My salvation comes  like the rain storm with a wild-eyed knowing that the truth of it cannot be found in the fiction that is this life. That is a saccharine  Hallmark movie, or a slasher movie (depending on the day)....and a movie only it is. Recently I have come to think that I am waking from a dream, pretty on some days and horrifying on others, and largely false.

 I  seek a more subtle and secret truth

 only knowable by  seeing

 upside down,

 ridiculously close

 and along the edges.

 It is the unknowable Source.

 God.

 The blood that life.

 To see it, I must blear everything. The smaller I look, the more true. 

    It is a scary business.

 It requires untethering, even from you, sweet boy,

 for that was a movie, too;

 one that I have binge-watched over and over and over.

 You are the star and no matter how often I watch...

the ending is always a dark surprise.

 But it is just a story of you.

 the real truth is more interesting.

 I like to think that I am brave enough to push my shoulders back and chest forward, like the daisies..... and go forth into this new knowing. Sturdy enough to dare to imagine another way.

     Let that version of the telling of you go.

     Watching the bugs in my meadow seems to help; Watching the clouds, too. Walks help immensely, and so do my dogs. Music as well. In listing these things it occurs to me that letting go of the story of us here on Earth is a little more plausible when my eyes stay fixed on tiny things. Whole worlds emerge, entire systems of life...the leaf, the bee, dew drop. Dirt and thistle and lichen. The dark truth of the spider.....Calms me down and brings happiness of sorts.

Enter Un-emptiness. The absence of absence. Erasing all ideas from before and hearing the truth pitched to a mystic chord.

Lyrics from obscure songs; a warm dog pressed against my leg ushers in the truest comfort from the unknowable, unseeable God. Incomprehensibly real Undefinable but present. There in every black hair on a spider's leg.....I look closer and closer and there is God again, orb-like and exquisitely undefinable;                                                                                                                                       

 reflected in the remains of the rain on a Lily.........

Ian, there is happiness and satisfaction here in the un-empty space between all things. In truth I have seen glimpses of it all my life, but now it is thrust on me at the turn of things. It is a gift, a bouquet I imagine...from a loving Creator and from you, who I have known for so many lives.

And like the meadow, today I can do this life again.

  

                                                                                              Love, Mom