photo by Leor MillerToday I am crying. My sky is crying on my tree as I sit inside watching it. I cannot go outside today because I don't have help. I did not know that I would not have help, and so I didn't ask around. I did not know that I would lose the ability to balance and walk. I did not know that I would lose the ability to talk and breathe. I did not know that I would know that I am dying.
What do I know? What do you know? Bill T Jones posed this question to the community in Deep Blue Sea--limitless answers flowed.
Zen loves to point to don't know mind. We aspire to be fresh to this moment, free of preconceptions, free of preferences, free of predictions. Not knowing is the most intimate. Just google it; you'll see.
Today I am crying. Once I asked a zen teacher if you can have emotion without delusion. She said No.
I know that I am deluded. My frontal brain matter tries to help by making sense of things, finding reasons for things, tries to slip me some hope like a little drug, a little cup of coffee that, when it wears off, leaves me empty and craving.
Murakami runs to "acquire a void." Science calls it "transient hypofrontality," says Annie Murphy Paul in Extended Mind. So many meditators try and fail to wipe out thinking, then conclude that it doesn't work.
I say my sad deluded mind and the crying sky are dying with me. Hold me. They are already gone.
October 10, 2021