came from loss of muscle tone in my body as my overactive thyroid consumed my proteins. I was so convinced I was beyond egotistic concerns for myself I couldn’t see my arrogance of denial. Subtle indeed. Does this make me an invalid (curious word in this context, if you shift the accent a little . . .)? No, I am getting better. It’s serious, permanent, but manageable, like a low-grade diabetes. This humbling lesson has not, however, changed who I am. Something else has, and I am still discovering what that something is.
The American Soto Zen teacher, Dennis Genpo Merzel, writes in The Eye Never Sleeps: “We think life and death [or sickness and health] are separate phenomena. We never think of life and death as the same; that would be illogical. Only one problem . . . reality is not logical. Truth is not rational; only our minds are. We are so egotistical, so arrogant, that we want to make reality into a concept, reduce life to a logical idea. We spend all our time looking for some concept of Truth, but Truth is what is left when we drop all concepts. . . .” Who is not dying or ill in some way? Death is the one thing at which we cannot fail.
Vimalakirti says: “All sentient beings are ill, therefore I am ill. My sickness will last as long as there is ignorance and self-clinging. As long as beings are sick, I myself will remain sick.”
It is a way of saying I will remain human. Merzel comments on this: “When we are trying to be strong, defending ourselves, we can’t let ourselves get sick. We force ourselves to stay well because we don’t feel strong enough to be vulnerable Delusion is a concept; enlightenment is a concept. Health is a concept; sick is another concept. We seek after health and try to avoid sickness, seek after enlightenment and try to avoid delusion. All are just concepts! Without concepts we find ourselves unbounded, undefined; and our greatest fear is to live without boundaries, without definitions Everyone and everything can come in . . . .” When my own health broke, something hard and bitter in me broke as well. There stood Nobody.
A Sweetness Appears and Prevails
The reason we bother
to get up in the morning
is because of everything;
is because there is another arithmetic
without internal sense
and we ache at the borders;
is because the grey music
of the first chickadee before dawn
in the hemlocks
is the grinding engines of the humpyard
carried on morning air;
is because we are afraid
and know everyone is afraid
and do not know
who will soothe our tears
nor how many tears
we will hold unshed.
You seem to be you
and I seem to be me.
My sorrows are no greater
than your sorrows.
Thou art beautiful,
o my loves,
as tears are.
This is how we begin—in the morning with small birds near and echoing train yards in the distance—afraid. Exactly like one another. If the grass, the trees, the small birds, the snow, the wind, and all things living and inanimate belong each to themselves, to whom do we belong? I am you when you are alone and nameless, before any river or tree, when the darkness before the stars itself was fearless.
Unravel All This Interim
There is almost always
sometimes an answer.
Each summer day the cabbage-white
lives forever
and has no use
for the center of anything.
As for the dried stones of winter—
he’s been them all.
In a universe of so-called oneness, what is not the same? We want it to be us. And we do not want it. The Chilean poet Cecelia Vicuños writes: “In Nahuatl, one of the names for God is ‘nearness and togetherness.”’ We wish to be unique and together at once. It is a kind of sadness, this longing.
Voices in Your Understanding
After this sadness
there is another sadness
and it must be addressed
without mute
for it presses urgently
for utterance
the endlessness of our longing
to return once again
to where the body
is blue leaves of sky
torn by the wind.
There is a mathematician and glass artist I know who claims we are simply our bodies and that our bodies are our memories, not the magnetic tape computer model but an inchoate mass of all we have experienced, from which we select our particular past to be who we think we are. It is the latter part of this equation that is mutable. Jorge Luis Borges pushes this vision to the limit in his short story, “Funes the Memorious,” in which a boy comes to remember absolutely everything without any choosing and becomes incapable of thinking about who or what at all: “To think is to forget differences, generalize, make abstractions. In the teaming world of Funes, there were only details, almost immediate in their presence . . . . Funes could continuously discern the tranquil advances of corruption, of decay, of fatigue. He could note the progress of death, of dampness. He was the solitary and lucid spectator of a multiform, instantaneous and almost intolerably precise world.” We are not our memories. We are not spectators. As Samuel Beckett writes, “Think about what you are saying. Do not think about what you are saying.”
There is a word that comes to us from the Middle Low German that means to be tongue-tied. Not so much that one cannot think what to say, but that the experience is so beyond words and the conditions defined by words and their reasoned order that the tongue is tied by expressing silence. It is mumchance. It is the experience one has confronting something beyond meaning. When something “means.” it means for us. I am tongue-tied when I confront what is, as it is, with no me as a referent. It is accepting a sense that is not our sense of the way a thing makes sense.
It has something to do with a new experience of faith. Not faith as one learns it: a compulsory belief in something one can’t really know. That was faith as an ideal. This is more of what a friend of mine in AA calls, “a willingness to take the next step even though you don’t know what will happen.” It is seeing the “truth” of every stone, every tree, every wind without concepts of truth or words to define it. The late Iris Murdoch suggests that concerned attention “effects a removal from the usual egotistic fuzz of self-protective anxiety. One may not be sure that those who observe stones and snails lovingly will also thus observe
